The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Social Travel: Rediscovering the Friendly Skies
- IBM: Black Friday Online Retail Spending Up 24.3 Percent
- Startups: Silicon Valley Vs. The Emerging World
- Daily Crunch: Hot Stuff
- ‘Twine’ Foreshadows A Future Where All Objects Talk To The Internet
- Microsoft: “Microsoft Has Had [Voice Control] In Windows Phones For A Year”
- ScottEVest Introduces The Puffer Jacket
- The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For?
- eBay: PayPal Mobile Payment Volume Up Over 500 Percent On Thanksgiving Day And Black Friday
- Walmart’s Black Friday Disaster: Website Crippled, Violence In Stores
- (Founder Stories) Bump’s David Lieb On Getting To 60 Million Downloads
- They’re Rioting Over BlackBerrys In Indonesia (And Other Black Friday Insanity That’ll Make You Fear For The Future)
- Why Quad-Core?
- In Look’s iOS Geo-Tagging App, You Can Put A Bird (Or Pepper Spray Cop) On Something And Just Call It Art
- TechCrunch Cribs: Iovox Is Rocking The Voice World, Literally [TCTV]
- AT&T To Press: We Withdrew Our Merger Application First
- Boots to Asses—WWE Social Media Strategy Leaves Others In The Dust
| Social Travel: Rediscovering the Friendly Skies Posted: 26 Nov 2011 08:58 AM PST  Editor's note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semil We've heard endlessly how "social" will eventually disrupt and transform old, stodgy industries, perhaps even reinvent them for the better. The promise of this change, of course, is often tempered by the reality that, if indeed this stuff actually happens, it will take time and we're currently in the early stages of the game. And when it comes to travel, one of the most heavily regulated industries, disruption and transformation would be music to travelers’ ears. There are a number of reasons travel has become more of an onerous task (thank you, TSA), yet consumers continue to brave the elements to merrily trot around the globe. Brushing aside the fact that a significant portion of travel is business-related, decisions around leisure travel typically involve a number of factors, many of which are coming online. The catalyst for a personal trip can originate from different sources. One could have vacation time that will evaporate unless you use it. One could be offered a travel deal rate that motivates you to capitalize on it. One may want to catch up with old friends or families, or travel for entertainment, adventure, or to simply get away from your surroundings. In exploring the travel space through a social lens, most of today's consumer web-related entrepreneurial attention is focused on what travelers do once they reach their intended destination. In the old days, travelers would book hotels directly (or through travel agents) and would rely on branded guides like Lonely Planet or Frommer’s, hotel concierges, and traditional tour companies to help address these needs. A few years later, services like Kayak and TripIt offered more options for users to organize their travel. Today's traveler has many more options. They can "couch surf" or use others' private spaces as lodging (thanks to Airbnb), and by comparison, could literally pick from over twenty different services to get information about their intended destinations. When I travel somewhere, I'll typically ask friends on Facebook and Twitter for recommendations, which so far have tended to be excellent and satisfy my needs. If I happened to need even more information, I could continue my research through sites like TripAdvisor, FlyerTalk, TripIt, Quora (local), explore Foursquare lists, peruse Gowalla's new social travel guides, or sign up for one of a new wave of startups focused on the space, such as Planely (meet people at the airport or on your flight), Trippy (friend-sourced itineraries), Triposo (interactive mobile guides), Travellr (location-based Q&A), Toour (currently in stealth), Tripping (traveler community service), Twigmore (connect with your friends' friends in other places), Globetrooper (tool to find travel partners), MyTab (where folks can gift travel to members), Gtrot (scrapes social data and aggregates around places), JetPac (seems to be a slick iPad app, but not released yet), and many, many others I haven’t gotten around to trying. Jetlagged yet? The sheer number of startups focusing attention on this aspect of travel seems out of balance to me. Investors like this particular space because the path to victory is clearer, albeit its crowded, and because these types of apps and services could be inherently viral, both in terms of onboarding new users as well as benefitting from positive word-of-mouth. Instead of destination-based guides, however, I've started to wonder if the real opportunity is higher up the decision funnel, before we buy plane tickets and hotel rooms, at the point we first feel the urge to travel. The best travel recommendations I've received (and acted on) have come through having conversations with close friends in real life. They share slideshows of their trip and we get to interact with them in rich ways about their experience, to see if we want to sign up for the same feeling. That is a true recommendation with a real strong social signal. These moments of inspiration oftentimes ignite the travel spark and could trigger a transaction. Startups like Gtrot and Gogobot, for instance, allow users to plan trips or record them after the fact, and research travel tips from social networks, organizing information around places. There's simply no way that all the destination-based services listed so far will be able to survive such a cluttered field, so it may be worthwhile for some of them to at least consider the discovery-related aspect of travel and to design systems that help draw out and collect users' preferences around travel, sort of how Gtrot and Gogobot currently do, but perhaps in deeper ways. The current offerings incorporate “social,” yes, but they seem to lack truly relevant social context. For a big decision like traveling, the strong signal usually originates from one trusted friend or source. Despite an unstable economy, rising fuel costs, and the hassles of air travel, people continue to jam airports worldwide. The majority of travel expenditures are eaten up by transportation and lodging, as well as food and entertainment at the destination. Therefore, today’s trend is to leverage social recommendations to help consumers shape their experiences in new places, though I’d argue this focus area actually ignores richer pastures. The real opportunities in social travel may lie closer to the top of the decision funnel, at the moment when a consumer discovers a new place he/she wants to travel to. It’s at this point where startups could build applications on top of existing social graphs to help people get inspired about travel, to plan and book their trips, and share them in novel ways with friends and family. There’s no reason TripAdvisor needs to continue to show up on the first page of Google results for travel searches anymore. With all of the data and pictures uploaded to Facebook, the opportunity is just sitting there, waiting for someone to jump on it. If done correctly, a new site or service could be created that actually acts as a modern travel collection and concierge in one, making travel arrangements easier and more affordable. In a nutshell, that is the challenge to startups in this space—to more intelligently incorporate data, to reinvent TripAdvisor’s existing offerings plus adding social, making results more relevant, personalized, and more emotional to interact with. Whomever can crack that code and present travelers with a better travel experience will find themselves in a very enviable seat, high up in the friendly skies. Photo Credit: Flickr / Phineas H
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| IBM: Black Friday Online Retail Spending Up 24.3 Percent Posted: 26 Nov 2011 08:15 AM PST  Thanksgiving brought record online retail sales for the holiday, with spending up 39.3 percent over Thanksgiving 2010. And today, IBM Coremetrics data shows a 24.3 percent growth in online sales on Black Friday compared to the same period last year. Mobile traffic on Black Friday was 14.3 percent of all retail traffic compared to 5.6 percent in 2010. Sales on mobile devices surged to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year. As we saw with PayPal stats from Thanksgiving and Black Friday, mobile shopping volume is increasing by over 500 percent this year. Mobile shopping was actually led by Apple devices, with the iPhone and iPad ranking one and two for consumers shopping on mobile devices (5.4 percent and 4.8 percent respectively). Android came in third at 4.1 percent. Collectively iPhone and iPad accounted for 10.2 percent of all online retail traffic on Black Friday. As predicted by eBay, Google and others, tablets were a major platform for shoppers this year. IBM says that shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices with conversion rates reaching 4.6 percent compared to 2.8 percent for overall mobile devices. IBM took a deep dive on conversion rates of mobile shoppers vs. online shoppers and traffic from social networks. Mobile shoppers demonstrated a laser focus that surpassed that of other online shoppers with a 41.3 percent bounce rate on mobile devices versus online shopping rates of 33.1 percent. Shoppers referred from Social Networks generated 0.53 percent of all online sales on Black Friday. Facebook led the pack, accounting for 75 percent of all traffic from social networks. There was actually a 110 percent increase in discussion volume around Black Friday sales on social networks compared to 2010, with conversations centralized around sharing tips on how to avoid the rush. Topics included out-of-stock concerns, waiting times and parking, and a spike in positive sentiment around Cyber-Monday sales. Department stores sales were up 59.0 percent from this time last year, mainly because of the strong deals and online shipping incentives. Home goods also reported a 48.8 percent increase in sales from Black Friday 2010 and apparel sales were also strong this holiday with Black Friday numbers showing an increase of 47.2 percent over 2010. Health and Beauty online sales were up 34.2 percent year over year. Considering the strength of online sales so far, it should be interesting to see if Cyber Monday, which tends to be a peak day for online retail, can surpass the sales from Black Friday.
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| Startups: Silicon Valley Vs. The Emerging World Posted: 26 Nov 2011 07:00 AM PST  Editor’s Note: Omar Koudsi is a co-founder and CEO of Amman, Jordan-based Jeeran, the largest review site in the Middle East and North Africa. You can follow him on twitter here @omarfk On my way to attending an Endeavor Summit this summer, I had the following conversation with a customs officer upon arriving in the U.S.:
This interaction has stayed with me because it seems to me to be a great example of the discrepancy between the reality distortion field that is Silicon Valley — and the reality almost everywhere else. Even the immigration officer at the San Francisco airport was of the opinion that five years is too long for a company to consider itself startup. Being from Jordan and having visited Silicon Valley on a number of occasions, this visit (along with others) continue to show how the realities of the Valley stand in stark contrast with what an emerging world founder, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, face to start and scale a Web business. I believe the lack of a well-developed ecosystem (funding, mentoring, risk culture, lawyers, human resources) puts the burden tenfold on the entrepreneur in the emerging world. In many cases, foreign entrepreneurs have to do ten times the lifting of an American startup — for a much longer period of time to boot — in order to succeed. My company (Jeeran) was lucky to find a VC firm called IV Holdings that had emerged in 2006 — way before entrepreneurship became cool in our part of the world — and it changed everything. Of course, it still took us a whole year to close our first round of funding, and really, throughout that period, there wasn’t any negotiation of terms — it was all just pushing papers. In the Middle East, few had done this kind of transaction before; we (founders, VC partners, lawyers, gov. departments) were all flying by the seats of our pants, figuring things out as they happened. Not to mention, before we were able to find a VC firm and secure our first round of funding, we had worked full-time on Jeeran for a full three years, bootstrapping, relying on what revenue we created, and additional generosity from our mom/brother/cousin investors. This is true for the majority of startups in the region. But, back to my trip to Silicon Valley: I attended a workshop at Stanford University given by a well-known human resources expert on the best ways for startups to find top tier talent. One of the tips he gave us was to interview at least 10 people for each position before choosing the right candidate — to take your time and be selective. I found it humorous, since we barely find a handful of people with enough expertise to make a difference, let alone 10 people lined for the database, UX, and product management jobs we (and so many others) are hiring for. Founders in the emerging world are mostly occupied with building-up talent as it comes along in bits and pieces, not recruiting it. Like most startups, we wanted our team to feel ownership over what we were building, so we sought to create a stock option pool. We worked with the top lawyers in the region and it took us around eight months to have it ready. In the valley, I got the feedback that such paper work (term sheets, share holder agreements, etc) are template-based and get pushed along by administrative assistants. Some of this much-sought-after legal framework is so popular they get published on Techcrunch! Of course, I forwarded this link to our legal counsel who found it quite useful. I found it comforting that many founders in Europe and even the East Coast complain about many of the same issues: Lack of venture funding, lack of talent, and an ecosystem that penalizes risk takers. Of course, this situation has much improved for them and for us, but it made me feel less lonely when I hear tales of East Coast founders trying to convince Wall Street talent to join a startup. We still lack that kind of talent pool (thankfully I guess, right?) to recruit from, but clearly the cultural challenge of jumping ship to a startup is shared. My team and I will continue to make pilgrimage to the valley and soak in experiences. We will happily put up with the mocking of how long it takes startups to shift to second gear for us to learn as much as we can. However, here is an invite for the Valley to go out and see how the startups of the world are solving problems in ecosystems void of the many resources taken for granted by the Y Combinator-accelerated generation.
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| Posted: 26 Nov 2011 01:00 AM PST  Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: 2011 Holiday Gift Guide: Laptops Are A Geek's Best Friend LuvBook S: Japan Gets Super-Cute "Hello Kitty" Laptop The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For?
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| ‘Twine’ Foreshadows A Future Where All Objects Talk To The Internet Posted: 25 Nov 2011 05:02 PM PST  Want to be notified to turn on the AC when a room reaches a certain temperature? Or when your laundry’s done? Well MIT Media Lab alumni Supermechanical have built Twine, a sleek 2.5″ rubber square which connects to Wifi and allows objects to “communicate” under certain conditions. The Twine, which reminds me of a Square from a design simplicity perspective, comes with a web app, ‘Spool’ which allows you to program its sensors with natural language rules like “When: accelerometer is at rest, Then: Tweet” in the case of the laundry done thing, for example. You can hook up the battery operated Twine to communicate through SMS, Twitter, Email and even HTTP requests if you’re into that sort of thing. The basic Twine comes with an internal temperature sensor and an internal accelerometer, and the Twine guys are making optional external sensors including a magnetic switch for doors, a moisture sensor and a breakout board for those of you that want to create your own DIY sensor action. Supermechanical says that it will develop additional sensors for every $10K over its Kickstarter funding goal. Possible options include an RFID reader, a pressure sensor and/or current sensor. After a stint on Hacker News, the project has received over $60K in funding, and with a donation of $90 you can order your own Twine through Kickstarter — A perfect gift for the person who has everything but a refrigerator door with its own Twitter account. When asked if the thing would actually work, Supermechanical’s David Carr told me, ”Of course, we still have plenty of rough edges and features to fill out, but we are well along the path at this point. If you’re concerned about our ability to deliver, you might check out some of our past work and bios.” Okay!
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| Microsoft: “Microsoft Has Had [Voice Control] In Windows Phones For A Year” Posted: 25 Nov 2011 04:26 PM PST In a charming interview with Forbes Magazine, Microsoft’s Craig Mundie discussed future products at Microsot, including the success and plans for the Kinect as well as their mesa para computación, the Surface. Most important to certain folks who like computers by Apple were his comments on Siri. Basically, he said Windows Phone has had voice control – namely simple commands like “text Mom” and Bing searches – for a year now. Duh! He said:
Now does that say that Microsoft can’t market product? Sure. Does it also say that people don’t care about Windows Phone? Why not. Does it say that Microsoft has a huge gap to close? Absolutely. Will they close it? Eventually, but it won’t be easy.
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| ScottEVest Introduces The Puffer Jacket Posted: 25 Nov 2011 03:29 PM PST ScottEVest makes clothes for use geeks. They have lots of pocketses, plenty of acceptable style, and you can amaze people by stuffing a water bottle and laptop out of one of their coats with room to spare. The jackets are available now for $190 but you might want to wait until Sunday/Monday to grab something a bit cheaper during their cyber Monday sale. I’ve been wearing one of the Puffers for a while and even on my husky frame it’s fairly cool – a little short around the waist but I can stick an iPad into it like a Small Arms Protection Insert and feel pretty badass.
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| The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For? Posted: 25 Nov 2011 12:52 PM PST  When the Kindle Fire first shipped a couple weeks ago, the reviews were mixed. Uncle Walt calls it good, but not great. David Pogue at the NYT thinks it is “sluggish,” lacking “polish or speed.” But the Kindle Fire is still selling like hotcakes. Some reviewers are disappointed that it is not an iPad, but that is the wrong way to look at it. The Fire is a standout media tablet that does a few things very well and I am going to tell you what they are. I’ve been using a Kindle Fire for the past two weeks (that is, when my kids or wife haven’t absconded to another room with it). The device passes my first test: my family fights over it. The Fire is kid-tested, and mother-approved. Fruit Ninja is the new obsession with my young children. Even my two-year-old, who loves the iPad, is increasingly eyeing the Kindle Fire and scheming ways to get her Mom out of the room so she can play with it. My wife will have none of that, she’s reading Joan Didion’s latest book on the Fire. I sneak it away from the bedside table when everyone is asleep at night to watch old episodes of Arrested Development. The Kindle Fire is purpose-built to find and consume digital media: books, movies and TV shows, music, magazines, apps, and the web. It is more limited in its capabilities than an iPad, but in these areas it holds its own. Let me address each of these areas individually: Reading A better comparison than the iPad is to other Kindles. I’ve been playing with a Kindle Touch as well, and the responsiveness of the screen is so temperamental that it is frustrating for me to use. The flicker of the E Ink screen also gives me a headache. No, if you are going to buy a Kindle buy the Kindle Fire. It is much better, even for reading digital books and magazines. The New Yorker magazine looks great on it. Yes, I know backlit screens are not as good for your eyes as E Ink, but who are we kidding? Many of us are staring at screens for 8 to 12 hours a day. I, for one, am used to it and find backlit screens more readable than E Ink. It also is much easier to highlight passages or look something up on the web straight from the text. The Kindle Fire also blows away the iPad as a digital book reader (as you would hope it would, coming from Amazon). Mostly, that is because of its smaller form factor. It is about the size of a large paperback. You can hold it in one hand and flick through the pages with your thumb. It is a much more pleasurable reading experience than the larger iPad, which is a little unwieldy by comparison for extended reading periods. Although, the Kindle app on the iPad is otherwise perfectly fine. Watching Despite its smaller screen size, the Fire is an excellent video viewing device. It ties in directly to Amazon’s Instant Video store, where you can either buy or rent video downloads. The selection is pretty decent, with a mix of old and more recent movies and TV shows. You can either stream the movies directly or download them for later viewing. I’ve had no issues with streaming. The pictures are sharp and I’ve watched entire episodes without any hiccups over a strong WiFi connection. You can also watch movies through Netflix or Hulu Plus, which both have apps available on the Fire. But if you are an Amazon Prime member (all-you-can-eat shipping for $79 a year), you get Instant Video thrown in. That’s a good deal, considering that the Netflix streaming-only plan costs $96 a year, and you don’t get free shipping of any Christmas gifts with that. The one drawback of watching video on the Fire is that it is a solitary experience. The small screen size does not detract from the viewing experience when you are holding it in your lap and watching alone, but it’s not great for watching a show or movie with someone else. It is the video equivalent of reading over someone’s shoulder. And there is no easy way that I can tell of projecting the video on a bigger screen like you can with Airplay on the iPad. Listening Quite frankly, I barely notice the music store on the Kindle Fire. There is nothing wrong with the selection, and I applaud the way it distributes MP3 tunes that are compatible with any player. But when it comes to digital music that I purchase, I am just too locked into iTunes (or streaming music services) to want to bother with the Amazon Music Store. It is too much of a hassle to figure out how to get the music into iTunes, where I can listen to it on my iPhone or through my stereo. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to walk around listening to an album on the Fire with my headphones plugged in. It’s not like you can go on a run with it. And listening through the Fire’s external speakers, while perfectly fine for a movie, is not the ideal listening experience. The one use-case where music does make sense is if you want to listen to something while you are reading or browsing the web on the Fire. Browsing The Fire’s Silk browser is supposed to accelerate browsing on the device by pre-caching pages in the cloud and delivering them more intelligently. The browser is fast and functional, but from what I can tell it is no faster than the browser on an iPad. I tested about half a dozen web pages. If there is a difference in page-loading speeds, it is not noticeable. In the Web browsing department, the iPad bigger screen size gives it the advantage. You are not squinting as much as you do on a mobile phone’s browser, but you squint nonetheless. I find myself pinching and zooming a lot to read webpages. The tabbed browsing on the Fire, however, is a plus. Playing Finally, there are the apps. The Fire only ships with a few thousand apps available for download, compared to more than 200,000 for the iPad. But Amazon has done an excellent job to make sure that many of these first apps are excellent. Games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds, while not unique to the Fire, are addictive and show off its graphics capabilities. Media apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora expand its entertainment capabilities. Some “apps” like Facebook and Twitter merely redirect to their HTML5 mobile websites through the browser, but I suspect they will get full-fledged apps in time. More importantly, the store, is much better organized and easier to browse than the official Android Market. If the Kindle Fire becomes the most popular Android tablet, as I suspect it will, then it could also become the biggest distributor of Android apps. Amazon’s app store finally brings a shopping and discovery experience to Android in much the same way that iTunes did for iOS apps. The best apps are still on the iPad and will continue to appear there first, but you are not giving up apps by going with a Kindle Fire. And they are just going to keep getting better the more people flock to the Fire, a device where buying media, including apps, is encouraged. People are not going to buy the Kindle Fire because of any of its specs. They are going to buy it because it eases them into the still-strange realm of digital books, movies, magazines, and apps. These are all media. The Fire makes it easy to find them and, more importantly, easy to pay for them. You hardly think twice about it. The ability to pack all your media into one little 7-inch device is still an incredible thing. But it is not just your media that makes it compelling. It is the access to Amazon’s vast and growing digital library of millions of books, movies, apps, and songs, all at your fingertips and one click away from your consuming eyes. If you do end up buying a Kindle Fire, I guarantee that you will end up spending a lot more than the subsidized $200 price of the device on media. And once you start buying digital media for the Fire, you won’t be going anywhere. Amazon will have you as a customer for life, if it doesn’t already. Watch the Fly or Die I did with John Biggs below for a look at the Kindle Fire in action.
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| eBay: PayPal Mobile Payment Volume Up Over 500 Percent On Thanksgiving Day And Black Friday Posted: 25 Nov 2011 12:18 PM PST  As we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010. On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST. There was a more than three-fold (350 percent) increase in the number of global customers shopping through PayPal mobile on Thanksgiving 2011 compared to last year. These shoppers were mainly located in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. eBay says that the amount shoppers in the U.S. that bought and spent via eBay Mobile more than doubled this Thanksgiving over last year. GSI Commerce saw a more than three-fold (345 percent) increase in U.S. mobile sales this Thanksgiving compared to 2010. And Searches through the local product listings platform Milo increased 557 percent percent over Thanksgiving Day 2010. For eBay, the busiest eBay Mobile shopping hour on Thanksgiving was between 6 and 7 p.m. PST. The five most popular categories shopped via eBay Mobile, excluding vehicles (by number of sold items) were Clothing, Shoes & Accessories; Cell Phones & PDAs; Jewelry & Watches; Collectibles and Toys & Hobbies. In electronics, the top purchases items yesterday were iPhone Accessories, the black Apple iPhone 4 (16GB), and the Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation (8GB). The dramatic rise in payment volume via mobile phones isn’t particularly surprising considering all the hype around mobile shopping this holiday season. But a 500 percent increase in payment volume for PayPal is still impressive for mobile shopping and we haven’t even seen the full numbers for Black Friday or Cyber Monday yet. So far, things look positive for Black Friday, eBay says that as of 11 a.m. PST, PayPal is already seeing a more than six-fold increase (538 percent) in global mobile payment volume on Black Friday 2011 compared to the same time period on Black Friday 2010. According to IBM, the number of consumers using a mobile device on Black Friday to visit a retailer’s site is holding firm at 17.37 percent and the number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase remains is at 9.73 percent. The iPhone currently leads all mobile device traffic at 6.77 percent, followed by Android at 5.37 percent and iPad at 4.6 percent. Already IBM says that afternoon results show that Black Friday 2011 online sales are 20 percent higher for the same time period over Black Friday 2010. Black Friday 2011 online sales eclipsed Thanksgiving sales at 2:20pm PST this afternoon, says IBM. Amanda Pires of PayPal tell us that the holiday is proving to be the largest mobile holiday shopping season PayPal and eBay has ever seen. “The retailers that are taking advantage of mobile shopping are going to win. We expect mobile shopping to continue to be strong throughout the holiday season.”
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| Walmart’s Black Friday Disaster: Website Crippled, Violence In Stores Posted: 25 Nov 2011 11:38 AM PST  Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon. We’ll let traditional news outlets cover the offline violence and focus here on Walmart’s web fiasco. Disgruntled online shoppers flocked to the GottaDeal.com forums to voice complaints about Walmart’s website problems. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the issues were, but the forums had complaints coming in every minute at one point last night from customers in Florida, Mississippi, New York and many other places. Many expected deals to go live at Midnight local time only to have to wait up until 3am EST. Visitors then feverishly filled shopping carts but suddenly found them empty when they went to checkout. Others were confronted with the error message “We’re having temporary difficulties arriving at the destination you requested”. Login problems also arose, with users being asked to enter their credentials when already signed in. One customer reported that they complained about the checkout disruption on Walmart’s Facebook Page but later found their post deleted. The entire Walmart site does not appear to have crashed. By keeping the site up despite the issues, Walmart may have sought to conceal the errors and avoid press coverage of the discontent. Loyal customers said they hadn’t had such problems since 2006 when Walmart experienced a similar breakdown of its site. The company pulled in $418 billion in revenue during the 2011 fiscal year, so today’s disruption could have cost it a lot of money. While it might be too late to save Black Friday, Walmart better be scrambling to fix its website for Cybermonday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, just 36 hours away. The corporation acquired two startups Kosmix and OneRiot this year and formed its Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs in an effort to improve its ecommerce offering. However, it’s competing with powerhouse Amazon, whose cloud hosting division may protect it from the outages that plagued Walmart today. If the errors persist on Cybermonday, shoppers may seek out a more reliable ecommerce solution. When customers post “I’m so frustrated I’m going to cry” and “an hour and a half of nonsense. shame on you Walmart!”, something has to change. Update 3:3o pm PST: We’ve learned that Amazon online ordering also experienced an outage this morning as well. Both Amazon and Walmart should expect record traffic this weekend through Cybermonday. Update 11/26 1:15 am PST: We’ve received word that this summer, Walmart laid-off its VP of Engineering/Ops Gene Wojciechowski. He was apparently well respected by engineering staff, and his absence may have caused Walmart to be less prepared to meet the Black Friday traffic surge.
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| (Founder Stories) Bump’s David Lieb On Getting To 60 Million Downloads Posted: 25 Nov 2011 10:30 AM PST  If you find traditional methods of exchanging contact information a bit lacking, Bump offers an updated alternative. Bump is an app that allows users to automatically exchange contact information—along with photos and other items—after bumping fists with smartphones in hand. Although it seems like the information passes between the phones, the trick is that it actually goes up to the cloud after being triggered by the phone’s accelerometer. In his first Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon, Bump co-founder and CEO, David Lieb relates how he conceived the idea for Bump one week into business school at the University of Chicago. He met co-founder, Jake Mintz at the same time and along with their third co-founder, Andy Huibers began building on “nights and weekends” during ”the fall of 2008.” By spring of 2009 Bump launched, and has since been downloaded more than 60-million times, he says, with 10 to 12 million active users in the last 30 days. Lieb admits his team caught a lucky break during Bump’s early days of attracting users. “We were the billionth app [downloaded] and that got us kind of promoted by Apple.” It “started this word of mouth distribution engine that just won’t stop.” He goes on to say that “70% of our downloads come from direct word of mouth.” The company has “spent a total of $42 on marketing.” Make sure to watch the entire video to hear additional insights, including Lieb’s pointed views on viral marketing and why he fled corporate America. Past interviews of Founder Stories featuring David Karp, Fred Wilson, Mike McCue, Laren Leto and many other leaders are here. Episode II of this interview is coming up.
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| Posted: 25 Nov 2011 10:26 AM PST  Black Friday often makes people act absolutely crazy. This is well-documented. Still, you don’t expect to see consumer-driven insanity go down in countries that don’t celebrate Turkey day and its accompanying shopfest. And that’s not where the surprises ended this morning in Indonesia. A crowd of 3,000 people waited in line today in Jakarta, Indonesia for a new smartphone. In fact, the group got so out of control that riot police had to be brought in to calm the masses. They weren’t waiting on the new iPhone 4S. Nope, not a random early Indonesian release of the Galaxy Nexus (which would be a surprise in itself), either. These people were waiting on none other than the BlackBerry Bold 9790, RIM’s latest attempt at being competitive in the smartphone arena. Actually, since RIM’s been sucking some fierce wind over here in the States we often forget that BlackBerrys are still one of the most popular brands in other countries. In any case, RIM may have bitten off more than it could chew this morning promising a 50 percent discount on the handset for the first 1,000 buyers. Turns out, about 3,000 people wanted to be one of those lucky thousand, and when the announcement came that the phone had sold out… Well, things got ugly. According to the Press Association, the masses were “rattling the gates” and later “went crazy” after hearing they would not only miss out on the discount, but the phone entirely. Here in the said-to-be civilized U.S. of A., things got even more ridiculous. Perhaps taking a cue from the police forces dealing with OccupyWallStreet (or casually pepper spraying cop), a woman in a Walmart took Black Friday shopping to an entirely different level last night in Los Angeles. At 10:20pm, the massive line was let inside the store at which point madness ensued. “People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray,” Alejandra Seminario told the Daily News. Yep, pepper spray. Some lady, who we shall henceforth refer to as “casually pepper spraying consumer,” whipped out a pepper spray can and let it rip to keep other (probably crazy) consumers away from the half-off electronics she’d been eyeing. Seriously. I really don’t even know what to say other than I’m scared, and I’m not having children.
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| Posted: 25 Nov 2011 09:52 AM PST  We are entering into a new era, ladies and gentlemen. Well, “era” may not be the right word considering how quickly things change in these here mobile parts, but the fact remains the same: Quad-core mobile processors are here. And the ones that aren’t quite here yet are coming. While many of our brilliantly geeky readers need no tutorial on the advantages of four processing cores, some of you may be thinking “Uh… OK, why do I care?” So I took it upon myself to place a few calls and get some of the big guns — Qualcomm, Nvidia, and TI — to explain why exactly you should care (or shouldn’t), and what kind of differences technology like this can make in the average user’s daily phone usage. Right off the bat, there are a few myths we need to squash, the most prominent being the misguided belief that doubling cores automatically doubles processing performance. That’s not so true. Upgrading from a single-core CPU to a dual-core processor yields 50 percent better performance, while upgrading from dual-core to quad-core increases performance by just 25 percent. The second commonly held but utterly untrue belief is that all mobile processors are created equally. These companies actually work extra hard to differentiate themselves, which is difficult when the end-user has little say over which processors get stuck in which devices. Generally speaking (as in, with no particular brand or model in mind), a quad-core CPU should most noticeably do two things. The first is to improve performance during multi-tasking or use of multi-threaded applications. Web browsing, for example, is a multi-threaded process, as are many advanced gaming applications. Android is also natively multi-threaded. The second noticeable improvement quad-core should yield is an increase in battery life. Now, your average CPU usually only consumes about 15 percent of your battery life during regularly daily usage, so the improvements won’t usually be that staggering. Still, battery life is a big problem right now in mobile and any improvement is a worthwhile one. Nvidia has been the first to bring quad-core processing to mobile, in the form of its Tegra 3 Kal-El SoC. Aside from the general benefits afforded by four cores, Nvidia specifically differentiates itself with what it calls a Companion core. The Companion core is a patented fifth core that maxes out at speeds of 500MHz. It uses patented technology known as variable symmetry multiprocessing (vSMP), which allows the processor to power cores on and off based on the device’s workload. The Companion core handles just about everything during low performance tasks and in stand-by mode, like email and monitoring the network for incoming calls. When you start on something more performance-intensive, like web browsing, facial recognition or photo stitching, other cores are powered on to handle the task. This is Nvidia’s way of improving performance while saving battery life, while others have found different ways to make quad-core stand out. Qualcomm, for example, is about to release its APQ8064 SoC, which has a special trick. Most multicore processors clock up and down at the same time. Qualcomm’s processor, on the other hand, is able to clock one core at the max while clocking the second needed core only to the speed it needs to complete the task. In other words, since Qualcomm’s processor cores can be clocked individually, a task that overflows on the first core may only need the second core spinning at 60 percent of its max speed. So just like Nvidia’s Companion core hooks you up on the battery life front, so will Qualcomm’s individual clocking technology. Texas Instruments, however, has yet to outline plans for their quad-core offerings and seems to be sticking with dual-core OMAP SoCs for the time being. That said, TI maintains that its OMAP 5 SoC equipped with a dual-core Cortex A15 processor (and two Cortex M4 cores) is a mature system that is more efficient at handling instructions. Some even refer to it as a quad-core system, though TI itself still calls this a dual-core SoC. And they believe it’ll compete. The company went so far as to say that its smart multi-core architecture actually takes 30 percent more instructions than the Cortex-A9 MPCore’s four processing cores as seen in Nvidia's Tegra 3. The truth is this is just the beginning when it comes to the migration toward four cores, and there’ll be plenty more to learn in the coming months.
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| Posted: 25 Nov 2011 09:45 AM PST  Banksy fans, this one’s for you. Imagine an iOS photo app that swaps out Instagram filters for stencils from your favorite meme or art piece, then add a little augmented reality, and you'll get Look. Built by a couple of the developers behind Sports+ as a side project earlier this month, it's the latest mobile app to use simple photo-editing and social features to make the world around you more interesting. After downloading Look for the first time, you log in with Facebook, then see a camera view with the "Look" stencil overlayed on it. You can then switch to new stencils, available in the first folder at the bottom of the screen, that include the Pepper Spraying Cop, Charlie Sheen's "Winning!" and a moustache for enhancing photos of your friends. If you want to unlock more stencils (at the price of $0.99 a pop), you can choose from sets of categories like birds based on Portlandia's "put a bird on it" sketch, various wildlife, movie stars, vehicles, etc…. Or you can make your own: take a photo in its stencil creation view, touch it up, then set it as your stencil and shoot away. Once you take a photo, you can adjust the color of the stencil and decide if you want to share it on Facebook or with friends or nearby users on the service. Shared photos appear in a reverse-chronological stream like in Instagram, and include location and time information, as well as the option to vote up the ones you like most. Although Look has begun as a fun side project to leverage existing code, it could have a lot of features in store: a gallery for the images that get the top votes, other sign-on and sharing services besides Facebook, and ways to share and sell your stencils to other users. They’re also planning an augmented reality view, moving beyond the current photo stream to show you other user’s stencils as you walk around. The stencil marketplace, combined with augmented reality, could be an especially powerful way for people to discover great new photos and make some money. And yes, Android users, a version is coming for you, too. Here are a few images from when I got carried away testing it: Don’t Think Different. Black Helicopter Spotted Over DC. Hi Honey, I Painted A Stencil Of Me Taking A Phone Photo Of Myself For You. Do You Like It?
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| TechCrunch Cribs: Iovox Is Rocking The Voice World, Literally [TCTV] Posted: 25 Nov 2011 09:43 AM PST  Iovox is a startup specialising in something known as VaaS (Voice as a Service). Their telephony platform allows companies to build services on the telephone network that do real-world, heavy-lifting style jobs which normally require call centres. Companies which have taken on the service include News International and many others. I went over to their West London offices (yes, not all startups in London are in the East, incredibly), to check out the legendary guitar playing skills of CEO Ryan Gallagher in our TechCrunch Europe version of TC Cribs. Maybe next time we should do a duet.
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| AT&T To Press: We Withdrew Our Merger Application First Posted: 25 Nov 2011 09:43 AM PST  This morning, AT&T issued a formal statement on the withdrawal of its application from the FCC regarding its merger with T-Mobile. The company had previously agreed to pay a $4 billion pre-tax charge in the case that its $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile failed to go through, $3 billion of which would go to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and another $1 billion going to the book value of spectrum access. Yesterday, on Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., AT&T released a statement announcing its intention to withdraw its request from the FCC. Today’s statement is meant to clear up misconceptions around its withdrawal request, namely that the FCC must approve it. According to Wayne Watts, AT&T Senior Executive VP and General Counsel:
In its previous statement, AT&T said that it still intends to seek the necessary FCC approval, so today’s clarification on whether or not the FCC needs to approve this request seems to be a message directly to the media. The press had reported that when the FCC said it would begin further investigation of the merger application, AT&T pulled its request. Now, AT&T is making it clear that it withdrew its request before the FCC made the ruling that would have sent it over to an administrative law judge for review. It seems that AT&T doesn’t want to see its request reviewed by the administrative law judge, so it was better for them to pull the request, regroup and resubmit the request instead of getting this one denied.
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| Boots to Asses—WWE Social Media Strategy Leaves Others In The Dust Posted: 25 Nov 2011 09:32 AM PST  Follow @TheRock@TheRock Dwayne Johnson Seconds from electrifying RAW. Time to feed the beast and make 3 words trend worldwide.. #BootsToAsses Editor's note: Guest contributor Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and start-up enthusiast, who blogs on a variety of topics including green initiatives, technology and marketing. Over the past year the WWE has continued to push the social media envelope by integrating Twitter and Facebook further into its regular broadcasts. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, now a cross-over star in both the WWE and Hollywood, cut a promo on WWE Raw to hype the upcoming pay-per-view “Survivor Series”. During that promo, the Rock quickly coined a new catchphrase "Boots to Asses" and said it was now trending worldwide. Before he mentioned it there was no mention of it on Twitter. Shortly after he said it, not only did it start a new chant throughout the arena, but it proved that Mr. Johnson was prophetic as minutes later the term "Boots to Asses" was trending worldwide. One might say this is a one off, but for anyone observing what the WWE has been up to this can be seen as only a small part of a much larger social media strategy. In the last year, the WWE has bolstered it's already strong web presence with a very savvy social media offensive. Now every performer who appears on WWE TV has their own Twitter handle which they use to build a fan following and actually continue storylines started from the show. During the broadcast, whenever a wrestler heads to the ring, their Twitter handle is prominently featured next to their name on the screen graphics. Their strategy is obvious and effective, providing a method to allow their show to be more interactive and leverage casual fans to tune in more regularly especially when something eventful is on the screen. Throughout the show, it is quite common to hear announcers talking about whether something is trending worldwide. Some wrestlers who are trying to increase their standing in the company have actually taken to social media to build an audience. Zack Ryder and his self-styled "Jersey Shore" persona created a series of YouTube videos to drive interest. To his credit, not only has he been successful driving nearly 100,000 people to become subscribers on Youtube, but he also has 300,000 followers on Twitter. He essentially went out and built a new fanbase for himself and received more airtime and interest as a result. Wrestlemania is by far the biggest event held by the WWE. To hype the main event, they have already launched a separate site to highlight their main fight, John Cena vs. Dwanye "The Rock" Johnson, and to encourage fans to choose whose side they're on. The site is integrated with both Twitter and Facebook pages. On each side they have attracted huge audiences. Here is the tale of the tape so far, and it is pretty impressive.
It begs the question why aren't other sporting or entertainment broadcasts integrating social media as aggressively into their broadcasts or event marketing. WWE uses social media to increase controversy and drive further interest while others shy away from it. It's obvious that WWE is Sports Entertainment with more of a scripted product, but why can't other entertainment channels adopt some of these social media strategies to drive interest and live involvement in their product. Why isn't Monday Night Football doing the same when a big game is coming up? They could use this strategy to hype, drive interest and attract new viewership or followers. I would offer two rationales, either they are afraid of the spontaneity of social media or don't feel like they need to adopt it. Aaron Rodgers, who is having the season of his life for the Green Bay Packers, only has 385,000 Twitter followers and the defending Superbowl champions only have 160,000 followers. Surely there is a bit of a disconnect here if someone in the NFL in charge of marketing hasn't been able to better connect and market this budding superstar and his team with fans in realtime. It seems like a missed opportunity, and while Aaron Rodgers is a huge WWE fan and loves to sport his “World Title” belt he does not have the social media presence of a World Champion. On the other side of the spectrum, the NHL has banned players from using Facebook and Twitter on game days. Several traditional entertainment channels including the major 4 professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) have all instituted stiff penalties . Chad Ochocinco in 2010 was fined $25,000 for Tweeting during a NFL gam. Not only do the Big 4 lag behind, but they haven't understood yet how to really leverage social media effectively for their product or audience, which is a bit of a shame when you think about it. The UFC, like the WWE, on the other hand, is another example of a sport with real personalities that is leveraging Twitter to drive interest. They have adopted some savvy social media strategies including showing the Twitter handle of a fighter as they approach the octagon. UFC events often drive trending topics throughout their events. The UFC president Dana White is out in front tweeting his live reaction to the fights like other fans out there. And it’s a two-way conversation. He actually takes feedback from the fans directly and learns how to make his product better. By letting fans interact closely with the fighters, the UFC has been able to humanize, grow interest and significantly increase buy-rates for their pay-per-view shows. Any entertainment brand that fails to interact with its fans is missing a huge opportunity. Especially in sports, it is really up to the brand or league to provide a proper outlet to hype and get their fans excited about upcoming events or games. The WWE, while an unconventional example, is easily leading the pack of this strategy to drive interest in their product and interact with their fan base. If you take a look at what the WWE is doing on social media compared to their counterparts in other sports, they are truly putting Boots to Asses. Follow @TheRock@TheRock Dwayne Johnson "Boots To Asses" aint just a way of life. It also means: "Would U kindly get the hell outta my way" #BlackFriday.
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