Sam's Internet

Apple Removes 'Rate on Delete' for Apps in iPhone 4 (Arn/MacRumors)

Techmeme — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:10:05 GMT

Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Removes ‘Rate on Delete’ for Apps in iPhone 4 — Rate on delete feature introduced in iPhone OS 2.2 — Developers will be pleased to learn that Apple has removed a controversial “Rate on Delete” feature from iPhone 4. Starting in iPhone 2.2, when a user deleted an App from their iPhone …

MacBook Pro Updates Imminent (Really), Part Numbers Appear (Arn/MacRumors)

Techmeme — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 04:05:03 GMT

Arn / MacRumors:
MacBook Pro Updates Imminent (Really), Part Numbers Appear — After months of speculation, it appears Apple is finally going to deliver new MacBook Pro systems to customers. The above screenshow shows part numbers that Microcenter has received for new Mac systems.

Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own

TechCrunch (Jason Kincaid) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 04:00:17 GMT

Remember Google’s Hell-froze-over, critically acclaimed Super Bowl ad Parisian Love? The one that managed to use a series of basic search queries to tell a touching love story? Now you’ve got a chance to tell a story of your own.

Some time in the last few days Google launched a new feature called the “Search Stories Video Creator“. And damn if it isn’t fun. The new feature prompts you to input up to seven search queries spread across Google’s search features (including Images, Maps, and standard web search), choose a song, and it generates a video in the same style as Google’s other Search Stories.

The whole process only takes a few minutes (the tool automatically uploads your video to YouTube when you’re ready). And while there are plenty of parodies already out there, we can expect a whole lot more of them to pop up in the next few days.

For those who were wondering, Parisian Love was only one of Google’s Search Stories — the company actually began releasing a series of them last fall (you can see all of them here).

Here’s a test video I threw together:

CrunchBase Information

YouTube

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bulls**t. ... (Dave/Master of 500 Hats)

Techmeme — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 03:10:24 GMT

Dave / Master of 500 Hats:
Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bulls**t. Show Me The MONEY or Go Home (Loser). — (shameless plug: May 12 SMASHsummit.com social media marketing conference - get a 20% discount at bottom of this worthless & wildly speculative post) — For everyone out there wondering …

Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes

TechCrunch (Greg Kumparak) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:12:36 GMT

As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software.

By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study

TechCrunch (Michael Arrington) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:59:39 GMT

Way back in February the writing was on the wall: Twitter would compete directly with third party developers who were creating Twitter apps. Twitter investor Fred Wilson reiterated that threat just a few days ago when he said most of the apps that third party developers had created were merely “filling holes,” not truly creating “something entirely new on top of Twitter.”

That sure sounds ominous. And then, BOOM. Twitter released its own Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, which has a popular iPhone and desktop app. The threats are over, Twitter fired missiles at its developers.

Anyone who didn’t see this coming was in denial. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is one developer who sure didn’t see it coming (disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic):

Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur two weeks ago, answering questions on Formspring:

Q: The “general” thinking is that Twitter will either buy Seesmic, or launch their own Seesmic/Tweetdeck killer, since they’ll eventually need to earn revenue (unless Google acquires them). Thoughts?

Loic: none of that will happem, it would be a disaster for them to compete with their ecosystem, which drives 70% of their traffic

Q: Seesmic stepped away from their proprietary products (video) and latched onto TWITTER – but, isn’t it very dangerous to be 100% tied to a 3rd Party platform where you have no control? Does it worry you?

Loic: not at all, Twitter is very respectful of 3rd party apps and we’re also on Facebook and more social networks

Loic Le Meur yesterday:

I have to admit I was not expecting Twitter to step so fast in the mobile client race themselves competing so fast with its ecosystem…As long as we keep moving and innovating and both partners treat each other in a fair way, I think we will all be safe, the hole is big enough and there are many other holes.

Oops.

CrunchBase Information

Twitter

Seesmic

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Steve Jobs' response on Section 3.3.1 (Greg Slepak/Tao Effect Blog)

Techmeme — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:05:00 GMT

Greg Slepak / Tao Effect Blog:
Steve Jobs' response on Section 3.3.1 — After posting my reaction to clause 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK terms I decided to write Steve Jobs the following email: … His response: … Of course he was right, I had somehow missed that post by Gruber, having only read the original.

Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone SDK Complaints: ‘Intermediate Layers Produce Sub-Standard Apps’

TechCrunch (Jason Kincaid) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:04:09 GMT

Over the last few days, the web has been awash with news that Apple has changed its iPhone developer SDK agreement to ban the use of “applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer”, which nullifies Adobe’s upcoming Flash-to-iPhone conversion tool and may also ban many other developer tools. Despite heated reactions from Adobe and many developers, Apple has remained silent on the change. However, it looks like Steve Jobs may have just broken through the wall of silence to address the changes to Section 3.3.1 — via an email exchange with a developer.

Greg Slepak, CEO of TaoEffect, emailed Jobs to voice his concerns and got a pair of brief responses, which he has posted to his site. In his first message to Jobs, Slepak included a link to a highly negative thread on Hacker News where many developers criticized the move. Jobs responded:

We think John Gruber’s post is very insightful and not negative:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

Steve

In the post that Jobs refers to, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains the logic that was behind Apple’s move (and given Jobs’ endorsement of the article, it looks like he was spot on). The gist of the article is that Apple doesn’t want a ‘meta-platform’ to exist between the iPhone and developers, as this would facilitate simultaneous development for competitors’ platforms and give Apple less control over the iPhone ecosystem. But while Gruber’s article is well thought out and very logical, I don’t think it does much to address why developers are furious. The issue isn’t that developers don’t understand why Apple is doing this — it’s that the actions Apple is taking to protect its own interests are violating something fundamental: they’re keeping developers from using the tools they want to work with.

Gruber’s article didn’t convince Slepak, either. His response to Jobs, in part:

“From a developer’s point of view, you’re limiting creativity itself. Gruber is wrong, there are plenty of [applications] written using cross-platform frameworks that are amazing, that he himself has praised. Mozilla’s Firefox just being one of them.”

Jobs replied once more, this time within a few minutes, to say:

“We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.”

I doubt this argument will do much to placate developers. There are plenty of examples of applications built using intermediary tools that are high quality. And the App Store is rife with applications built using Apple’s own tools that are absolutely terrible. Apple is already enforcing a screening process anyway — why isn’t it checking for quality there, rather than telling developers how they’re going to build their apps?

Here’s the last message Slepak sent to Jobs:

The Mac has only been helped by the fact that Firefox, Ableton Live, and hundreds of other high-quality applications can run on it thanks to the fact that developers have a choice as to what tools they can use on it.

Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are, and it doesn’t make sense to limit source-to-source conversion tools like Unity3D and others. They’re all building apps through the iPhone developer tools in the end so the situation isn’t even comparable to the Mac where applications can completely avoid using Apple’s frameworks by replacing them with others.

In my opinion, 3.3.1 only serves to make the platform less attractive to legitimate developers, giving them reason to write their software for competing platforms instead.

Thanks for considering this.

Sincerely,
Greg

For the whole Email exchange (with Slepak’s full responses to Jobs) check out his post.

Weekend Update 04.10.10- The Afterglow Edition [Digital Daily]

All Things Digital (Drake Martinet) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:22:56 GMT

The tech media were catching up on sleep this week after all that iPad build up. It was years of speculation, of rumor mills and photoshopped images. This week, finally, at long last, we all got our hands on one of these little guys and now we can stop talking about it. Right.

Kara started off the week by dispatching yours truly to join Robert Scoble in the overnight line outside the Palo Alto Apple (AAPL) store. There were a couple dozen padinistas who braved the cold to get theirs first, and we put together some videos of all the fanboy nerdery. Kara then jetted off for a couple of her signature high profile interviews and reported back to all of us at AllThingsD. Kara confirmed suspicions that Yahoo! (YHOO) CTO Ari Balogh will be leaving for family reasons, and dropped some names for possible successors. Kara rounded out her road trip with a flip video of Juniper Networks’ (JNPR) Kevin Johnson. They talked iPad, as Johnson is a pretty good guy to comment on how it may affect things like networks, for instance.

John took the week off, but Digital Daily was alive and kicking, at least during the Apple OS 4 event. We liveblogged all the action from Jobs, Forstall and Schiller, right from 1 Infinite Loop.

Media Memo was abuzz with an exclusive from the west coast early in the week. We ran into Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy in line while waiting for our iPad and he gave Media Memo a sneek peek of cooking attractions for the internet meem du jour. Peter then moved on to some good news about advertising, for a change. It seems that internet adds are coming back, but not as fast as media types might hope. In the same vein, Peter brought a little breakdown of Apple’s new iAd platform, and what it may mean for the media industry, how it might make developers money, and how it wont suck.

Walt devoted his column this week to an all iPad followup. He answered some burning questions about the iPad, and made clear some points that had even confused Weekend Update. Mossberg’s Mailbox was full of questions about steaming video, computers for school and running Windows on a Mac. Walt always gives the straight talk, and the questions answered this week were no exception. Katie also did the iPad shuffle this week, and brought a review of some of the best apps currently offered for the new device. She broke them down well in writing, and even threw in a little video for good measure. She never dissapoints.

That’s all for now from Weekend Update. We’re going to go curl up with our iPad and wifi and not come out till June. Or, at least until Kara makes us come back next week for another installment.

New in iPhone OS 4: The Full App-by-App Breakdown (Jeremy Horwitz/iLounge)

Techmeme — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:10:06 GMT

Jeremy Horwitz / iLounge:
New in iPhone OS 4: The Full App-by-App Breakdown — Apple debuted the beta version of iPhone OS 4 yesterday, announcing a collection of new features and additions to its prior iPhone and iPod touch applications. Based on photos and details submitted by an anonymous source …

U.S. Steps Up Probe of Tech Hiring (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:00:10 GMT

Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Steps Up Probe of Tech Hiring — WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is stepping up its investigation into hiring practices at some of America's biggest companies, including Google Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Apple Inc. and IAC/InterActiveCorp., people familiar with the matter said.

Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

Read/WriteWeb (Audrey Watters) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple's announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking. While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple's Game Center - a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple's Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking.

Sponsor

The Game Center may be Apple's attempt to compete with Facebook's dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming. A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga, maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion.

Unlike Facebook, Apple does not currently have a social network upon which to automatically connect players and friends, although implementation of the Game Center may well bring this about. Details about the Game Center were not explicit in Thursday's announcement, although the beta release of the operating system will include a developer preview of Game Center and contain a set of APIs so that mobile game developers can build apps that take advantage of the social gaming network capabilities.

Echoing the popularity of gaming on the iPhone, initial analytics since the iPad release point to the continued domination of the App Store by gaming and entertainment applications. The updates to the iPhone OS could provide an opportunity for mobile and social game developers and for entrepreneurs in the gaming industry.

Discuss

Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit

TechCrunch (Jason Kincaid) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:21:14 GMT

For all the credit Facebook has received for its privacy controls and user safety, the site still falls prey to an unsettling number of security issues and potential data breaches. Last month a botched code push accidentally revealed private user email addresses, and before that Facebook accidentally sent private messages to the wrong recipients. Today, security engineer Joey Tyson, AKA theharmonyguy, has detailed a major security hole in Facebook Platform — one that would allow a malicious website to silently access a user’s profile information, photos, and in some cases, messages and wall posts, with no action required on the user’s part.

The exploit, which we’ve confirmed has now been patched, could hijack the session of a previously authorized third party Facebook application and invisibly pass it off to a malicious app. In his proof-of-concept, Tyson embedded Farmville in an invisible frame on his site. He then used some trickery with Facebook Platform parameters to pass all access rights Farmville had on to a malicious data harvesting application. In short, any of the many millions of people who had previously installed Farmville and visited the apparently benign proof-of-concept site would have their data invisibly harvested. If the user had granted Farmville additional permissions to access their Wall or messages, then the malicious app would have them too. Tyson only used Farmville in this instance because of its massive install base, but he could have used any other third party app.

Fortunately, Tyson doesn’t have reason to believe this exploit has been abused, stating “It’s unlikely that any real-world attacks used this particular vulnerability, and I certainly have no record of such a case.” But he also notes that it may have existed for a year or longer.

Further, Tyson thinks that Facebook still has problems with the way Platform is set up that expose it to vulnerabilities like this:

I commend Facebook for responding quickly to this issue and for being open to white-hat security reports. But in my opinion, this vulnerability is simply the latest reminder that the Facebook Platform can open users to many problems quite separate from the security of Facebook itself. I personally think that aspects of the Platform’s implementation fail to match user expectations of privacy, as I’ve discussed previously. And while this particular problem may be solved, vulnerabilities in specific applications and the nature of application access continue to put private data at risk of unwanted disclosure.

For more technical details on how the exploit worked, check out Tyson’s post. Tyson has written quite a few other articles detailing flaws with Facebook security, including his Month of Facebook Bugs, which exposed some serious issues with Facebook Platform last October (he notes that some of these have since been fixed).

CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Information provided by CrunchBase

Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group

TechCrunch (Evelyn Rusli) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:19:17 GMT

It was inevitable. Adobe has an unofficial Facebook fan club: “I’m With Adobe,” an allusion to the viral “I’m With Coco” campaign for jilted ex-Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien. As of Saturday afternoon, the group (started by John Addis, a Web & Media Director at Rizzi Designs) has attracted more than 1,200 members in less than three days.

The group’s manifesto is:

The recent war between Adobe and Apple reached a breaking point on April 8, 2010, when Steve Jobs not only recommitted to never allowing Flash to run on the iPhone or iPad, but even banning Adobe’s new Flash-to-iPhone C compiler which was to go on sale Saturday, April 10.

There is no longer any debate as to who the “bad guy” is in this story — Apple has proven themselves to be anti-competition, anti-developer, and anti-consumer.

I stand with Adobe.

While you would expect a club like this to attract rabid Adobe supporters (and there is a lot of that), several members expressed their longstanding support for Adobe and Apple and the difficulty of reconciling their frustration with the new SDK agreement and their fierce loyalty to Apple. As one Facebook user put it :

How did we get to this point? The tension between Apple and Adobe has been simmering for quite a while, but the clear breaking point (as we all know) was the release of the new SDK agreement which essentially blocks Flash developers from the iPhone.

I tried to put together an (incomplete) collection of Adobe employee reactions— from the iPad release to Adobe’s “Viva La Resistance.” In my last post, “Adobe: Go Screw Yourself Apple,” some commenters pointed out that the title was unfair because it was the words of Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow and not Adobe’s official position. True, Adobe CTO’s carefully worded (sadly, less colorful) blog was the “official” response, however, Brimelow’s post and comments by several of his Flash colleagues forms an interesting constellation that outlines a deep anger. Adobe is furious. Further, as we previously noted, Adobe did look at Brimelow’s blog and let him run with it anyway— only pushing him to extract one line and add a disclaimer (the disclaimer was added roughly one hour after he sent a Twitter link to his post).

First, before we look at the iPhone OS 4.0 fallout, let’s skip to somewhat happier times (to last weekend) when Adobe’s employees lined up at the Apple store to eagerly purchase Steve Jobs’ latest offering. Arno Gourdol, a member of the Adobe Air team, documents their morning: “After queuing for an hour at the flagship Apple Store in SF this morning, we finally got our hands on a stack of magical devices. We’ve spent the rest of the day having fun getting the first Adobe AIR apps running on the iPad….We have also been working on bringing up the first “HD” apps that take advantage of the gorgeous screen of the iPad.”

You can already feel the dark clouds forming. Fast forward to Thursday, developers find out that the SDK agreement will effectively ban Flash and other cross-platform development tools, like Unity, on the iPhone.

It Gets Ugly…

Thursday evening:
Adobe’s John Dowdell ruminates on issues of intolerance and the Seinfeld Soup Nazi:

Thursday 11:47pm:
Senior Research Scientist for Adobe, Dan Goldman, calls foul on Twitter. “No Flash in iPhone to save battery? OK, whatevs. No cross-compiling Flash apps to iPhone using Packager? That’s a mighty low blow.”

Friday 8:44am:
Dowdell’s done with thinly veiled analogies. “…If you’re looking for a more ethical company, Adobe is hiring:

Friday about 9pm:
Adobe’s Photoshop’s Principal Product Manager, John Nack, takes a jab at Apple in the comments section of his blog (his response is in italics):

Friday 12:47pm:
Lee Brimelow links to his now notorious: “Go Screw Yourself Apple,” post.

Friday 4:08pm:
Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch, issues the company’s formal response.

Saturday around 7:00am
Adobe’s Sujit Reddy retweets a call to give up Macs, says he plans to do the same.

Saturday around 11:00 am:
Brimelow tweets a picture of his new Apple free set-up: “My new setup (http://tweetphoto.com/17920343). Asus U Series laptop, Windows 7, BackTrack 4 VM, and Alfa AWUS036H for wireless mischief.”

Anyone get the sense that this is just the beginning?

CrunchBase Information

Adobe Systems

Information provided by CrunchBase

Where to Watch the Streamy Awards Online

NewTeeVee (Janko Roettgers) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:00:25 GMT

You could call them the Oscars of the web, the Emmys of online video, or the Webbys of… webby things with moving images, I guess. Either way, the Streamy Awards, which are happening this Sunday in Los Angeles, are indisputably the most prestigious awards show of this newteevee world. This year’s show will be hosted by comedian Paul Scheer, feature a Visionary Award for YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, and offer the rare chance to see people like Lisa Kudrow and Zach Galifianakis share a red carpet with Amir Blumenfeld and the folks from INST MSGS. The show is starting Sunday at 5:30 PM PST / 8:30 PM EDT, and you can watch it live online right here on NewTeeVee (as we are, after all, one of the show’s co-hosts).

You can’t wait that long, or you won’t make in back in front of your PC in time? No worries, there’s also a live-streamed pre-awards show as well as an iPhone app for all those web video fans on the go. In addition, the player embedded below will show the work of Streamys nominees before magically transforming into a live player a few minutes before the show begins.

The pre-awards red carpet show, which will be hosted by Mark Malkoff of Mark Lives In IKEA fame, is starting Sunday at 4pm PST / 7 PM ET. Malkoff will apparently bring some IKEA furniture to the red carpet, and he’ll be joined by Kristyn Burtt of the Web.Files and Coin-Op TV’s Cyndee San Luis. You can watch the show before the show in the player embedded below, or at Ustream.tv.

Live TV : Ustream

Finally, iPhone users can follow the Streamy Awards live on their phone with the help of a dedicated iPhone app.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): By The Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series

myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month

TechCrunch (Jason Kincaid) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:15:59 GMT

Many people have never heard of myYearbook, a social network that skews pretty young (half of its members are teenagers). But it’s got a substantial audience, with around 55.7 million visits and 4.3 million uniques a month, according to comScore. And recently, it’s been growing very quickly — according to comScore, unique visits are up 23% since last November, and page views are up a whopping 83% over the same time frame, to 998 million. Earlier this week, I sat down with CEO Geoff Cook to talk about what’s driving the growth.

The key, Cook says, is a feature that launched in November called Chatter (which has no relation to the Salesforce feature by the same name). Chatter is a lot like Facebook’s News Feed — it’s a stream of content recently posted by other users on the network. But unlike Facebook, which populates your feed with items from your friends, Chatter is geared more towards meeting and interacting with people you don’t know. Cook says one contributor to the feature’s popularity is the fact that you can filter what type of items you’re seeing — for example, I could elect to see only content posted by women aged 20-30 (for this reason, the site has a more flirty nature than what you’ll find on Facebook). That’s helped the feature catch on, and Chatter is now seeing 1 million user updates a day.

To help boost engagement, myYearbook has borrowed features popular on other sites and incorporated them into Chatter. First, the site added Ask Me, which is a Q&A feature very similar to Formspring.me. It then added ‘Rate Me’, which lets you post a photo and have it rated by strangers (which sounds like a recipe for low self esteem, but Cook claims that people receive quite a few ’10’s). The site also plans to add a feature called ‘2 Truths & A Lie’, which is an online version of the classic game.

Some of the site’s growth — the boost in unique users, in particular — is likely due to the fact that myYearbook now syndicates Chatter updates to Twitter, which direct users back to the site. But he says the rise in engagement (page views have jumped from 544 million in November to 998 million in March) is primarily from users interacting more with the site, and it’s driven by Chatter, along with the site’s redesign. Cook also points out that according to comScore, myYearbook has more page views than Twitter.com does in the United States (though he concedes that much of Twitter’s traffic comes from third party clients, and Twitter has a large international audience).

Looking forward, Cook says that the company will soon be launching applications for both the iPhone and Android.

Here’s a video the site is using to promote its recent growth;

CrunchBase Information

myYearbook

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Is Steve Jobs Ignoring History, Or Trying To Rewrite It? (Erick Schonfeld/TechCrunch)

Techmeme — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:10:20 GMT

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Is Steve Jobs Ignoring History, Or Trying To Rewrite It? — Very few people get the chance to make history. Even fewer get the chance to make it twice. Perhaps that is why it is so fascinating to watch Steve Jobs as he tries to usher in the era of mobile touch computing today …

ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 10 April 2010

Read/WriteWeb (Admin) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:45:00 GMT

There are seven new events on the calendar this week: Head over to Stanford University to learn whether the real-time Web is an imperative or insanity. Check out the Net Prophet conference in Cape Town, South Africa. There's also the Digital Sport Summit in Melbourne, Australia. And don't forget to register for ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010!

How do you like your events guide? You can import individual events into Google Calendar using the link beside each entry, or download the entire thing as an iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file, or even view it as a world map. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

Sponsor

13 – 15 April 2010: Dallas, Texas

PubCon South

PubCon, the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. PubCon South will include cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register here.

16 April 2010: Mountain View, California

Under the Radar: Cloud

Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference, featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com.

16 – 17 April 2010: Royal Oak, Michigan

FutureMidwest

FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference and TechNow.

Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here.

17 April 2010: New York City

Seven on Seven

Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new - be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine - over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17.

Seven on Seven Participants include, on the technology side, Ayah Bdeir (artist and programmer), Jeff Hammerbacher (Accel Ventures/ Facebook), David Karp (founder of Tumblr), Andrew Kortina (of Bitly/
Venmo), Hilary Mason (of betaworks), Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress), and Joshua Schachter (currently at Google, formerly at Yahoo, and founder of delicious), and on the art side, Tauba Auerbach,
Cao Fei, Aaron Koblin, Monica Narula, Marc Andre Robinson, Evan Roth and Ryan Trecartin.

Conference attendance includes a half-day session where the seven teams will unveil their ideas, followed by a cocktail reception in the New Museum Skyroom. Find registration information here.

April 19, 2010: St. Louis Missouri

Social Fresh St. Louis

The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy, Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.

19 – 21 April 2010: San Francisco, California

DrupalCon

DrupalCon is the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal experts.

Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and management.

20 April 2010: Palo Alto, California

The Real Time Web: Imperative or Insanity?

The cost of creating, sharing and distributing data in real-time has become essentially zero, leading to an explosion of user generated content. Currently, every minute:

500,000 pieces of content are shared on Facebook,

25,000 messages are created on Twitter, and

20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Over the last decades, the amount of data created by individuals has doubled every two years. How do we effectively use that data to make decisions that drive value for consumers and businesses? How much data is too much to handle? And what's the opportunity for entrepreneurs? In this event, VLAB engages with entrepreneurs, investors, and established players to separate reality from hype while examining key business opportunities.

26 April 2010: San Francisco, California

Future of Money and Technology Summit

The Future of Money & Technology Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell, formerly of ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and many more.

Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration.

3 – 6 May 2010: San Francisco, California

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco brings together the designers, developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketing professionals, product managers, and business strategists - from startups to enterprises - that are building the next-generation Web. Along with a vibrant Expo Hall and plenty of networking opportunities, four main conference tracks cover a spectrum of Web 2.0 topics from business strategy to Web design, user experience, developer hacks, community building, real-time, mobile, cloud computing, user-generated content, and more. Featured speakers include Chris Anderson, Ben Huh, Charlene Li, Kevin Lynch, Hilary Mason, and Brad Stone. Register today.

7 May 2010: Mountain View, California

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference.

An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks.

Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform?

Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?

Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices.

Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices.

Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.

Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR.

Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Click here to register now, or to become a sponsor, or to help shape the conference.

11 May 2010: San Francisco, California

FinovateSpring

FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day.

Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available.

13 May 2010: Cape Town, South Africa

Net Prophet 2010 Conference

Taking place on 13 May, 2010 at the Old Mutual Business School in Pinelands, Cape Town, this is the second annual Net Prophet conference to be hosted by the RAMP Foundation, a non-profit entity created by the RAMP Group as a means for social investment within the local Internet based economy. After a very successful conference last year, where over 400 attendees tapped the minds of leading Internet experts and successful entrepreneurs, Net Prophet 2010 will build on the same format and anticipates on reaching many more people.

May 17 2010: San Francisco, California

SF MusicTech Summit

The SF MusicTech Summit will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment. Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off.

18 May 2010: Silicon Valley, California

Founder Showcase

On Tuesday, May 18th, 10 companies elected by over 13,500 registered CEO Members of TheFunded.com will present to an audience of 200 investors, founders, and members of the press. A panel of experts will critique the pitches, and voting from those in attendance will determine the grand prize winner, who will receive $2,500 on the spot and a host of other prizes.

Founder Showcase guests will be treated to food and drinks, as well as informative talks by two leading Silicon Valley CEOs. There is also a networking and Pitch Table area for startups, service providers, and investors to convene. Previous investors that have attended include Charles River Ventures, JAFCO, Leapfrog, Polaris, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, First Round, Blue Run, and various angels. Over $250,000 has been raised by presenting companies that met investors at previous Founder Showcase events.

Use discount code "RWW" to get a 10% discount.

18 – 19 May 2010: Santa Clara, California

Social Media Strategies

Social Media Strategies is a conference on social business, social marketing, advertising and optimization. Social media technologies are fundamentally changing the sales, marketing and operations process. Business are leveraging social technologies to acquire, market, and communicate with customers. This conference features cutting edge topics, keynotes, workshops and discussions that provided strategic knowledge, insights and real world examples on how to successfully plan, implement and manage your organizations social media efforts to achieve your business goals.

Use the code "readwriteweb" when you register and get $100 off.

19 – 21 May 2010: San Francisco, California

eCommAmerica

Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm) is focused on what's "Next in Telecom, Mobile & Internet Communications". It's designed to accelerate communications technology and business model innovation. Participants attend to be exposed to the latest technologies, research, companies, trends and opportunities.
Day three this year is being dedicated to augmented reality. AR may prove to be as significant as the introduction of the Internet itself, moving computers off desks and out of their separate modality into our lives. Use discount code 'ReadWriteWeb' for 10% discount.

25 – 27 May 2010: Denver, Colorado

Glue

Glue is the only conference devoted solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a "post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets, PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5), platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus), Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world.

ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of registration by using the code "RWW12".

27 – 28 May 2010: Beijing, China

Global Mobile Internet Conference

The Global Mobile Internet Conference is designed specifically for entrepreneurs, executives and influencers to understand and capitalize on the growing opportunities in mobile internet. Though focused on opportunities in Asia, much of the conference dialogue is intended to compare and trade best practices across borders, especially between the East and West. Around 1000 industry leaders from Asia, Europe and North America are expected to attend. The conference will be in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

28 May 2010: Beijing, China

Global Mobile Internet Conference - Innovation Show & Startup Competition

The Global Mobile Internet Conference Innovation Show intends to be a launch pad for innovative mobile internet startups from around the world. Innovation Show finalists will have the opportunity to present their company to an expected 1,000 investors, industry leaders, and press. Finalists will be judged by and receive feedback from a team of respected venture capitalists and angel investors. The judges will choose one company as the GMIC Innovation Show Winner. Startups must apply by April 4.

15 – 16 June 2010: New York City

Corporate Social Media Summit

The Corporate Social Media Summit is a two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring:

Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully
20-plus corporate speakers (including PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson),
Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social media in your business
A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth, practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding corporate use of social media

Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here.

22 – 24 June 2010: Santa Clara, California

Velocity

Now in its third year, Velocity - the Web Performance and Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media - is dedicated to helping people build a better Internet that is Fast by Default. Join hundreds of web developers and experts under one roof from June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA Velocity packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into three concentrated days. You'll be able to apply what you've learned immediately for high impact results and you'll come away prepared for what's ahead. O'Reilly Velocity 2010 is the premier conference dedicated to building industrial strength sites, at internet speed. Velocity">Register Now and save 25% with discount code "vel10rww".

29 – 30 June 2010: London

Cloud Computing World Forum

The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include:

Co-located with CloudCamp London
Co-located with Green IT conference
Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre
Free-to-attend evening awards presentation
Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices
Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services
Evening networking party for all attendees

7 July 2010: Melbourne, Australia

Digital Sport Summit

Digital Sport Summit is Australia's premier sport and digital media event. Hear from social media pioneers who are changing the face of Australian sport. Learn how social media and mobile technology is taking fan engagement to a whole new level.

Speakers on the day will cover a variety of topics including:

iPhone application development for sport
Convincing management of the case for social media
How to monetize social media
Fantasy sports
Social media from an athlete's perspective

With speakers representing Essendon Football Club, Cricket Victoria, Herald Sun, Football Federation Australia and more. Digital Sport Summit will take place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

5 October 2010: New York City

FinovateFall

FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies.

FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today's market. Early bird registration rates are available.

Download this entire events calendar in iCal format.

Discuss

Java Creator James Gosling Leaves Oracle (Darryl K. Taft/eWeek)

Techmeme — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:45:00 GMT

Darryl K. Taft / eWeek:
Java Creator James Gosling Leaves Oracle — Java creator James Gosling has left Oracle. What is next for the language pioneer? — Java creator James Gosling has left Oracle. — In an April 9 blog post, Gosling said he resigned from Oracle on April 2.

Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail?

TechCrunch (Guest Author) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 16:37:11 GMT

Editor’s note: Guest author Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of video site WatchMojo. In this post he examines the two biggest content farms springing up on the Web: Demand Media and Aol. You can find his previous guest posts about online video here.

Are content farms the future of online media? Demand Media is now providing travel tips to USA Today, and Aol is supplementing its thousands of paid journalists with an even larger army of citizen freelancers. If nothing else, Demand Media and AOL deserve credit for generating excitement over content. While an octogenarian like Sumner Redstone might claim that “content is king” and a septuagenarian like Rupert Murdoch will echo that “content is not just king, it’s the emperor of all”, the so-called cool kids advertisers want to reach could care less about content.

But, the fact remains, everywhere you look, it’s about content consumption and monetization. In The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that the inertia facing TV executives stems from their desire to see “online video generate enough money to cover their current costs”.

When Wired recently profiled Demand Media, owner of the eNom domain registrar, who, armed with over $300 million in venture capital is positioning itself as a low cost content creation and monetization machine, it summarized its worldview:

“Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but [CEO Richard] Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.”

Not to be outdone, Aol is using its Seed.com freelance platform to produce more content at lower cost. It also recently acquired Studio Now to freelance its video content needs. Unlike Demand Media however, Aol has also hired expensive writers, leaving some to wonder what its strategy is exactly.

Granted, second guessing the companies’ Web-savvy CEOs might prove foolish. Former Google ad executive Tim Armstrong is CEO and Chairman at Aol, having since hired a battalion of experienced executives. Richard Rosenblatt —the man who sold MySpace to FOX —is running Demand Media, at his side is Shawn Colo, who was as instrumental as Rosenblatt in raising the war chest currently at their disposal, and their Chief Revenue Officer is Joanne Bradford.

Sizing up the Premium Content Space

Mind you, an impressive background and money in the bank doesn’t guarantee success (Joost anyone?). To evaluate their strategy, it’s important to understand the market they’re coveting.

In How To Make Money In Online Video, I introduced a pyramid representing super premium, premium, prosumer and user-generated content. We have now updated to reflect where each one operates.

Established and/or well funded companies should focus on the upper half of the premium space and the lower half of the super premium space. The sweet spot for smaller startups is to operate between the 50th and 75th percentile of the premium space. I think for start-ups to tackle the 76th to 100th percentile of the premium space is costly and risky (anything in the super premium space is suicide), and operating below the 50th makes it hard to create a valuable catalogue that can be licensed or secure ad dollars from premium marketers. The upper half of the super premium space should be left to Hollywood.

Aol is at once attacking the lower half of the super premium space (by hiring experienced writers and producing live video segments with artists such as Beyonce), the premium space (more or less what its niche sites are doing) as well as the higher end of the user-generated space (through Seed.com and Studio Now).

Will it work? I don’t know. It cannot possibly be everything to everyone at once, but it can play in the various areas to see what will do best and phase out what doesn’t stick to the wall.

Demand Media, meanwhile, is clearly operating in a lower sphere, which is the area between the upper half of the UGC space up to the lower half of the premium space. This is a tough space to be in if you want branded marketers and ad agencies to sign on and give you dollars.

Advertising: The Last Bastion of Unaccountable Spending in Corporate America

For centuries, publishers have filtered audiences for marketers. These days, advertisers like to be next to brands: Pepsi wants to be on MTV, Budweiser on the Super Bowl. There is a science to the decision-making process, but it’s fuzzy math at best.

Sometimes, marketers will point to one article or video as a reason not to run ads on a site. This could prove to be the undoing of these content farms. So while Demand Media might be printing money matching articles with search traffic and text ads, its current model will always be one questionable piece of content away from losing branded advertising deals, which to quote Google’s own CEO Eric Schmidt is “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America”. That might be why Demand hired Joanne Bradford, who ran ads for MSN before short stints at Spot Runner and Yahoo!

Should Demand Media Move Upstream?

When Demand Media acquired Expert Village (a user-generated instructional video site), it bet big on UGC, which while highly scalable and low cost is generally shunned by marketers. Before the acquisition, Expert Village allowed filmmakers to submit a) ideas for experts and b) segments they wanted to shoot. The fee was nominal, but with volume, it would be worthwhile to filmmakers and to Expert Village to boost catalog and traffic volume. After the acquisition, everything was transferred to ehow.com and that system completely changed. The new management no longer allowed filmmakers to submit just any idea; in fact, filmmakers were suddenly limited to choosing titles out of a library database on eHow.

Telling a creative person that they need to choose subjects from a list in a database is not really going to work in the long term. But exacerbating matters was that this made the revenue potential less interesting for a filmmaker.

Since filmmakers would oftentimes match up with an expert, this new system meant far less videos produced per shoot, which after considering the time to travel to a location and back rendered the exercise futile. Adding to the challenges was the sudden new need for graphics.

Without a doubt, these little changes improved the quality of Expert Village’s library and made the videos more SEO-friendly, but by requiring more from filmmakers, Demand Media inadvertently made the quality of contributors suffer by becoming a more suitable home for novice filmmakers. So what it gained on one front through improved processes it lost through inexperienced talent.

This is why folks like Slate’s Farhad Manjoo have ripped Demand Media to shreds, echoing the fact that its content is good enough to get indexed on Google’s search results but bad enough to induce users to click on a Google ad and go elsewhere (thereby generating revenue for Demand). That might actually have been one of the nicer things said about the company.

Of course, it’s not what journalists have to say about the company that will matter in the end. Publishers fight for the hearts and minds of viewers/readers and marketers.

So, what do marketers think?

Online Content is Art and Science

Successful content creation is both art and science. Costing and scalability are important considerations but the winning strategy cannot boil down to that alone.

Making sure it’s SEO friendly is also important, but in a world where content is shared through social networks, it needs to strike a chord with audiences, be it readers, listeners or viewers. Video, in particular, is not even really properly indexed on search engines, so an SEO-centric strategy might be useless to begin with. I’ve covered what makes video get discovered before.

But as much as venture capitalists don’t like to hear this, no amount of science will remove the art that is publishing, or the emotions that fuel marketing decisions.

Rating Aol and Demand Media Against Content’s Three Pillars

Video content involves production, publishing and distribution.

Production is a commodity and expensive; hence why both companies are trying to inject more science into the art to drive down the price of production. A low cost approach can maintain a high enough quality with text content, but with videos it’s more challenging. Moreover, a totally freelanced production team can also have some iota of consistency across text content, but with videos, nothing looks alike and marketers don’t feel any confidence in running ads. Quality content requires consistency. If a media planner agrees to spend $1M on a website running ads next to certain content, it assumes that the content the publisher produces tomorrow will be as good (and similar) to what it sees on the site today. A freelance model does not guarantee consistency and a UGC platform guarantees that it won’t be, especially with video.
Publishing (i.e., building a destination) is a challenge. Demand Media doesn’t have a destination but has a lot of eyeballs through its many sites; AOL meanwhile still has oodles of traffic and in addition to the AOL.com portal has many smaller niche sites with the potential to drive traffic too. Here, we see a divergence between Demand Media and AOL. On the one hand, AOL really does not need to focus purely on search traffic because it has traffic from its sites. Demand Media, however, has a more byzantine traffic pattern on its many sites, so I can understand the focus (and need) to focus on search traffic. However, search traffic is “in and out” and not the kind of engagement that branded marketers look for.
Distribution is increasingly fragmented, to the extent that even AOL is migrating from the one size fits all portal to the multiple web properties, and Tim Armstrong citing “fragmentation is our friend”.

All in all, considering that Demand Media doesn’t have a big top-10 stand alone property, I can understand why it takes the search arbitrage approach, but AOL’s efforts undermine the reality that despite its sliding traffic from ISP users, it has a large audience base and if it produced compelling content, then it would be able to retain and grow that base. It could be argued, of course, that Armstrong is doing both: hiring the best writers to have that front and center but then turning to the world’s freelancers and users to contribute the stuff that will trip up Google’s search index and offset the fleeting ISP users.

I respect that with Tim Armstrong’s background at Google, he needs to balance his vision of Aol being the Time Inc. of the 21st century with a scalable model that will get “quants” excited, but he might risk having a bad apple ruin the entire bushel by embracing the UGC freelancer base, as he did during SXSW.

Meanwhile, Demand Media has enough money to experiment until it finds a solution, like Aol. At least it’s betting in the right broader space, albeit it needs to fine-tune its methodology to make the lofty investment it secured a profitable one. So long as it remains private and all it has to worry about are the journalists, then it might find its sweet spot over time.

With the Web entering a phase of greater content consumption and content not being a zero-sum game, the reality is both companies can succeed with their strategies, but how big a crop their content farms will yield is still a big unknown.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Andrew Stawarz

CrunchBase Information

AOL

Demand Media

Information provided by CrunchBase

Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff In China

TechCrunch (Guest Author) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:16:09 GMT

Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company American Innovative in Boston, MA. Adam founded the company in 2003 with the help of the US Government's SBA loan program and is currently the 100% owner. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, both from Cornell University. Adam's writings can be found on his blog at DesignTheatre.net and through his Twitter feed. He welcomes your comments. Read more about sourcing in China here. It’s Saturday morning at 6am. I’m about to leave my Boston apartment for the first of three legs from Logan International Airport to Hong Kong via New York and Tokyo. I will arrive at 10:30pm on Sunday. Against insurmountable odds it appears that both my Boston and New York flights are on-time – an anomaly if there ever was one given that we’ve had a full week of driving rain in Boston and two feet of snow in Westchester County, just 45 minutes north of New York City where my parents told me they’ve had to sleep at a friend’s place because they’ve been without power for days. Still, never to disappoint, and despite clear sunny skies, my commuter flight from Boston to New York is delayed almost two hours on account of “missing personnel.” This conjures up images of airline top brass scrambling around to replace the guy who’s responsible for loading the salty snacks on the plane (as if) when the gate agent clarifies that our secondary officer is on his way from another city. Or maybe he overslept. Fortunately, having learned my lesson just months ago when traveling to a trade event in Las Vegas (my luggage was lost, never to be recovered to this day!) I seemingly accurately surmised that the chances of my checked baggage successfully navigating three airplanes and two carriers would be slim-to-none. As such, I had packed light. My fiancee made me pack two pair of pants, which I felt to be overkill, but I have a feeling I’ll thank her later.

How-To: Spring Cleaning Time For Your PC

TechCrunch (Devin Coldewey) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 14:46:29 GMT

I was just reminded by a spring cleaning article that it's been quite a while since I checked under the hood of my PC. Enthusiasts know and love the process of getting air-flow-reducing dust bunnies out of their cases, but a lot of people out there (and perhaps some readers) may have never even tried it. It's actually quite easy and you should give it a shot — I put together a video this afternoon just to show the basics.

Why a Bad Economy Is the Best Time to Start a Business

TechCrunch (Guest Author) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 14:43:11 GMT

A guest post by Adam L. Penenberg

While researching my latest book, Viral Loop, an in-depth look at how companies like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Skype and others grew so big so fast, it occurred to me that each of them was founded when the economy was flat, bad, or worse, in recession. I suppose that describes virtually any company founded since the dot com bust, but what’s interesting is that it also characterizes some of the most successful companies in history, some that trace their roots back more than a century.

Since 1851, the US economy has been in periods of contraction roughly one-third of the time, yet sixteen of the blue-chip companies that comprise the Dow 30 were founded during recessions and almost 60% of Fortune 500 companies began business in a bear market, according to a June 2009 report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Proctor & Gamble survived the panic of 1837, then the worst recession in our young nation’s history, while General Electric came out of the economic chaos of 1872 and Hewlett Packard was born in the Great Depression. McDonald’s fried its first french fry just before the onset of World War II. Charles Schwab sprouted out of the early 1970s as rampant inflation threatened to get out of control.

Of course, there are many more. Home Depot, Microsoft and Apple emerged from the depressive Carter Administration when stagflation choked the American economy. Verizon (originally Bell Atlantic), Adobe, Compaq, Lotus, Silicon Graphics to Sun, withstood the recession of 1982. And as I noted above the dot com bust of 2000-2001 didn’t prevent MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social media companies to achieve billion-dollar valuations in the span of a few years.

Why, though? After all, venture capital investment dips dramatically when the economy hits rough patches, which means there’s much less money available for startups. In 2000, the high point, investors anteed up more than $100 billion into startups. By 2008, that number had dropped by almost three-fourths to $27 billion, and in 2009 it plummeted to less than $20 billion, about the same level as 1998. Nevertheless it appears that money is spent more wisely. Dot com excesses—startups with scant business plans and which spent millions on forgettable Super Bowl ads —were borne of cheap money (insert usual snide reference to pets.com). When the economy is tight, however, investors gravitate to companies with well-articulated revenue plans.

This hasn’t been lost on some entrepreneurs. When Amit Chatterjee approached venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in late 2007, the economy was limping along with a growth rate of 0.6 percent, capping its worst year in half a decade. But Chatterjee, who was trying to get his green startup off the ground, wasn’t fazed. In fact, he was encouraged. Because he knew that when the economy is at its worst is often the best time to start a company. Chatterjee says he even trumpeted this in his pitch to Kleiner. What’s more, he told the VCs it could very well work to their benefit.

“We were built to survive a recession while guys funded during the up market weren’t,” Chatterjee says, “Venture capitalists gave us extra due diligence and we had to be singularly focused on providing value to customers.” His company, Hara, based in Redwood City, CA, provides environmental and energy management software and support for businesses intent on lowering their carbon footprint and energy consumption. In business for a little more than a year, Chaterjee counts Coca-Cola, News Corp., Aerojet, Intuit and the City of Palo Alto as customers.

Businesses like Hara are able to parry the economic forces arrayed against them and turn them into advantages. It’s not one big thing. It’s a lot of little things that add up. Higher unemployment means it’s cheaper to attract and retain top talent. Office rents are lower, which lessens overhead, and suppliers can be squeezed. Management is freed from a steady parade of analysis calls and reporter interviews to focus singularly on their customers, core products and revenue generation. Investment money is used more efficiently; there’s much more of emphasis on operating lean and mean. And there are other benefits. Job creation in startups founded during shaky economic periods is “less volatile and sensitive to downturns than job creation in the entire economy,” the Kaufman report states.

While it’s true that many of the approximately half a million new startups founded between 2008 and 2009 will ultimately fail, it’s equally true that another generation of great high-growth companies will not only emerge from the recent economic meltdown, but perhaps, in some part, because of it.

But you’d better get started. The economy may be recovering.

Adam L. Penenberg is author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves and a journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

How To Be Happy At Work…And To Deal With That Jerk Boss

TechCrunch (Vivek Wadhwa) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 14:00:50 GMT

In my last post, I wrote about how education can boost workforce productivity and lead to greater corporate success. But there is actually an even more potent ingredient for boosting productivity: happiness. According to author and business coach Alexander Kjerulf, the Danes have a word for happiness at work: arbejdsglæde (and if you want to stay happy, don’t try to pronounce that). Kjerulf says that this concept is deeply ingrained in the Scandinavian work culture. It’s about enjoying what you do; feeling proud of your work; knowing that what you do is important and being recognized for it; having fun; and being energized.

When workers achieve arbejdsglæd, the business benefits from higher productivity, because happy people achieve better results; higher quality, because happy employees care about quality; lower absenteeism, because people actually want to go to work; and less stress and burnout, because happy people are less susceptible to stress. Not surprisingly, all of this leads to higher sales, better customer satisfaction, more creativity, and higher profits for the business.

Sounds like some kind of Nirvana or Disneyland, doesn’t it? After all, who doesn’t want to be happy? And how can one be happy at work when the boss is a jerk, the company doesn’t care for its employees, and the job simply sucks? One of my old friends, Professor Srikumar Rao—who is the best marketing person I know—just wrote a book on this. He has some very interesting remedies.

For example, what do you do about the jerk boss? Srikumar says that by allowing him to leave you a “quivering mess of indignation, resentment and frustration” you’re handing the keys to your happiness over to him. Remember that he may have control over what you do at work. But he has no control over your emotional well-being unless you let him have it. Just look at your boss and see the mess of emotions that slosh through him: anger, insecurity, fear, and jealousy. Now consider this: You only have to deal with him a few hours a week. He has to live with himself for his whole life.

Did you smile as you considered this? Good. That is important, because in that smile is the seed of compassion. That is the start of seeing him as a human being, caught in his own predicament, and not solely as an impediment to your well-being. And when you learn to deal with him on that level rather than relating to him in his role as “boss”, the dynamics of the relationship change. It sounds simple, but it is very powerful. Srikumar says that when people start thinking like this, they lift the once totally toxic interactions to the “I can survive this” level and even to the “He’s not bad at all” level.

It is easy to look at all the things that are wrong with your job. But instead of being despondent at work and focusing on the two or three things that you think are wrong with your job, try thinking about the twenty or so things that are good about it. Try making a list of all that’s good about your job, including the fact that you have one. Don’t think it; FEEL the gratitude. Let it well up and surround you and overflow. It takes some practice, but you can get there. Now from this space tackle the problems you are facing. They no longer seem so formidable, and the odds are great that you can tackle them more effectively.

You may feel as if you are kidding yourself when you try hard to focus on what is “good” about your job, but you are indulging in exactly the same mental gymnastics when you are preoccupied with what you “dislike” about it. So you may as well invest your emotional energy in ways that make you feel and function better.

Another important lesson: You always get to pick the way you see the world.

In the early stages of a start-up, an entrepreneur was irritated by employees who bothered him with “trivial” issues. He reacted with sarcasm and brusqueness and even by blowing up. His view was that his time was “important” and they should be able to take care of such issues themselves. After several of his key people departed, he woke up and changed his ways. He consciously trained himself to view each such interaction as an opportunity to forge a relationship with the employee and to reinforce his idea of company culture with emphasis on independence and innovation. Not only did turnover drop; some of those who left came back.

Srikumar’s advice strikes a chord with me. When I was preoccupied with the many problems that beset any growing company, I was sometimes far from ebullient, and this brought down the morale of the entire company. My own experience has taught me that those who choose to view life as a learning opportunity to take responsibility for their own actions are also the most confident and the happiest. They are the ones who build enduring companies.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Sam's Internet

Apple Removes 'Rate on Delete' for Apps in iPhone 4 (Arn/MacRumors)

MacBook Pro Updates Imminent (Really), Part Numbers Appear (Arn/MacRumors)

Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own

Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bulls**t. ... (Dave/Master of 500 Hats)

Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes

Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study

Steve Jobs' response on Section 3.3.1 (Greg Slepak/Tao Effect Blog)

Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone SDK Complaints: ‘Intermediate Layers Produce Sub-Standard Apps’

Weekend Update 04.10.10- The Afterglow Edition [Digital Daily]

New in iPhone OS 4: The Full App-by-App Breakdown (Jeremy Horwitz/iLounge)

U.S. Steps Up Probe of Tech Hiring (Wall Street Journal)

Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit

Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group

Where to Watch the Streamy Awards Online

myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month

Top 10 YouTube Videos About The Web

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Internet People!

History of the Internet

Social Media Revolution

Internet Party: When Google's parents leave town...

1981 primitive Internet report on KRON

The Internet in 1969

Web 2.0

The Internet Stars Are Viral

The Future of Publishing

Is Steve Jobs Ignoring History, Or Trying To Rewrite It? (Erick Schonfeld/TechCrunch)

ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 10 April 2010

13 – 15 April 2010: Dallas, Texas

16 April 2010: Mountain View, California

16 – 17 April 2010: Royal Oak, Michigan

17 April 2010: New York City

April 19, 2010: St. Louis Missouri

19 – 21 April 2010: San Francisco, California

20 April 2010: Palo Alto, California

26 April 2010: San Francisco, California

3 – 6 May 2010: San Francisco, California

7 May 2010: Mountain View, California

11 May 2010: San Francisco, California

13 May 2010: Cape Town, South Africa

May 17 2010: San Francisco, California

18 May 2010: Silicon Valley, California

18 – 19 May 2010: Santa Clara, California

19 – 21 May 2010: San Francisco, California

25 – 27 May 2010: Denver, Colorado

27 – 28 May 2010: Beijing, China

28 May 2010: Beijing, China

15 – 16 June 2010: New York City

22 – 24 June 2010: Santa Clara, California

29 – 30 June 2010: London

7 July 2010: Melbourne, Australia

5 October 2010: New York City

Java Creator James Gosling Leaves Oracle (Darryl K. Taft/eWeek)

Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail?

Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff In China

How-To: Spring Cleaning Time For Your PC

Why a Bad Economy Is the Best Time to Start a Business

How To Be Happy At Work…And To Deal With That Jerk Boss