Techcrunch

Jesus. Maybe literally.

Fox News has a long and illustrious history of saying some fairly outrageous things. A story today on FoxNews.com may be one of the best yet — certainly from a tech perspective.

The post entitled “For Apple Followers, It’s a Matter of Faith, Academics Say” argues that while people may joke about Apple being a religion (JesusPhone, etc), to some, it may actually be a religion. Better, they wonder if Apple shouldn’t pursue that path. Here’s Fox News’ keys as to why Apple is similar to a religion:

• Apple’s creation story epitomizes the humble garage origin of its technology — not unlike the humble manger of Jesus’ birth.
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs is perceived as a messianic leader who was fired but rose again to save the company.
• Apple has traditionally had an evil archenemy, the Devil, as represented first by Microsoft and now by Google.

Yes, Apple’s start in a garage is very similar to Christ’s birth.

They also note that the Pope is scared of such a religion because he once rhetorically asked if a savior was needed in a modern wired world. Clearly, that means Apple.

The story goes on to wonder if Apple — not some crazed Apple fanboys, mind you — might apply for religious status in the future. “Indeed, it would be interesting if Apple were to apply for such a status in the future.“

Naturally, the main impetus behind this farce is that the author can’t understand why people continue to buy iPhones even though they don’t work. Therefore, Apple must be a religion. “It’s not a matter of rationality, it’s a matter of faith,” the author argues.

Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, the story remains the same. The iPhone 4 does indeed have an antenna issue, but it’s not a major issue in real world use. If it were a major issue, the millions of people who have bought the device over the past month would be returning it en masse. If something doesn’t work, you return it — it’s that simple. That isn’t happening.

So which argument makes more sense? Are the returns not flowing in because it’s really not a big deal — and overall the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone out there? Or is it because Apple is a religion?

[photo: flickr/roblisameehan]

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You’ve normally got two choices in site heatmapping (figuring out where eyeballs land on your site),  you can either buy costly specialized equipment ($40K) or pay a consultant to use their own equipment, which costs upwards of 5k dollars. Y Combinator funded GazeHawk has figured out a more pared down and innovative solution: Why not use webcams?

Co-founded by Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, newly launched GazeHawk is less expensive than most already existing eyetracking services at 1/10 the price. And heatmapping, something that required custom hardware and bringing people into a lab, now requires simple consumer hardware and proprietary software.

GazeHawk has its own network of test subjects; All you need to do as a website owner is give them a url or a screenshot and you get back a site map of the most active viewed places on your website, instead of having to got through the unwieldly and costly processes described above.

Though similar in concept to UserTesting, GazeHawk is disruptive in the sense that we’ve never seen a low-cost, low-effort eye tracking service before. According to Krausz, GazeHawk’s future plans include a number of extra features, better visualizations, allowing people to use their own test viewers, and eventually expansion in to the UX industry — Creating product based on tester feedback,  i.e. what people want to see.

Weary readers have learned to ignore ads, especially those placed in the bottom right corner. Say Krausz, “People are so good about identifying ads nowadays that if anything looks like one you lose the entire area.” Below is a GazeHawk heatmap of our site — most notably people are looking at our story rotator, ING Ads and not our events stuff.  So quick look to the bottom right! Look!

Aside from being fascinating, accurate heatmapping is crucial to informing online ad placement, cost per click and cost per impression are just not as accurate when measuring brand conveyance. For those interested in trying it out, GazeHawk is offering a 50% discount for TC readers, just enter TECHCRUNCH10 at checkout.

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Tomorrow, Friday, is our fifth annual yearly blowout party at August Capital – the event I look forward to all year. Tickets to that event are long gone, but a handful are left for the all day conference we hold prior to the party, the Social Currency CrunchUp.

Here’s five reasons why you’ll want to attend:

1. Ron Conway and Paul Graham, the alpha deities of entrepreneurs, will kick things off at the ungodly hour of 9 am in the morning.

2. Playdom CEO John Pleasants is joining us for a special interview just days after he sold his company to Disney for $763.2 million. He promises to tell everyone in the audience how to build and sell a company for at least that much.

3. Chamillionaire will be on stage in the afternoon to explain how, after you sell your company for $763.2 million (see no.2 above), you can go on to dominate the hip hop scene and become famous as one of the most talented musicians of a generation.

4. You’ll then see a special demo of new search engine Blekko. Only 30 or so people in the world have used Blekko to date. Attendees will get access to the new service.

5. It’s the only damned way you can get into the party at August Capital at this point, and you definitely don’t want to be the person who just reads about it on Twitter the next day.

Yes, I know the CrunchUp is $300, and some of you aspiring entrepreneurs really need that $300 for food while you build your empires. So we’re going to give away four tickets to the event to the four people who leave the most believable comment below as to why this will change their lives, and they must attend. Also, if you can juggle really well, that’s a plus, and we’ll probably put you on stage between sessions. We’ll pick the winners at 5 pm California time.

Buy Tickets To The Social Currency CrunchUp Here.

For years, YouTube has allowed its users to upload however many videos they wanted, but with a catch: unless you were part of one of YouTube’s special partner programs, no video could be more than 10 minutes in length. Today, YouTube is changing that: it’s boosting the maximum upload length to fifteen minutes, giving the site’s millions of amateur directors a bit more leg room.

YouTube imposed the 10 minute restriction to help cut back on piracy (of course, it’s always been possible to simply string together multiple 10 minute clips to create a longer video, but that’s harder to distribute and has a worse viewing experience). Obviously the fifteen minute limit is still going to be irritating in some case, but it’s good to know that YouTube is actively working to extend it. In its blog post, YouTube explains why it can finally make the change:

Well, we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today.

Content ID is YouTube’s automated system that can identify and flag videos that it suspects contain copyrighted content. YouTube works directly with parters to get material like TV shows and movies, which it can crosscheck again whenever a user uploads their video. And it works really, really quickly (often before your video is even finished processing). The owners of the copyrighted content can then choose if they want to have the offending video pulled, or if they want to run their own ads against it.  Hopefully as ContentID becomes more advanced and YouTube’s library of content to check against expands, it will be able to ditch the time limit entirely.
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Google’s mobile ads are becoming more location-aware. Today, Google is introducing mobile display ads for both the iPhone and Android phones which can be geo-targeted. Advertisers will be able to check a “location extension for display” box and their ads will become geo-enabled when viewed in mobile browsers or apps.  A little double-arrow will open up the ad and show the business pinned on map with two big blue buttons to get directions or call the business.  Google will only charge for calls or clicks.

Google already offers so-called “location extension” ads for mobile search, but this is the first time it is expanding the concept to mobile display ads.  Google says that mobile ads that offer a location generally see an average 8 percent increase in click-through rates over plain-vanilla mobile ads, and click-to-call mobile ads see a 6 percent increase in clicks.

Mobile ads such as these could open up new marketing opportunities.  Seeing a business on a map makes it less abstract. It literally grounds the ad for the consumer.  And the click-to-call option is key.  Local merchants love getting calls from customers.  In addition to targeting by location, of course, Google also targets mobile display ads contextually and by device.

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TechCrunch reader Saul Lustgarten checks in to tell us he logged on to Facebook this morning and noticed that the list of his friends who are having their birthday today was preceded by a crude message, reading “fuck you bitches”.

Yeah right, we thought. I checked it out on my Facebook profile and didn’t notice anything off.

Then, I followed Saul’s suggestion of switching my main language to Spanish instead of English, and lo and behold (click for full-size image):

We’ve contacted Facebook to see if they really mean it or if their army of volunteer translators – there are two sides to that shiny crowdsourcing medal after all – or one of their coders simply decided to have some fun.

Update: sorry to disappoint, but it seems to be fixed now. But it was definitely there.

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Amazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn’t look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual-use Kindle DX. (The low price, $139 for the Wi-Fi version, certainly doesn’t hurt.)

Immediately following the announcement, I saw something that confused me. For whatever reason, it seems plenty of people are comparing the Kindle to the iPad, almost as if these people want the Kindle to be the iPad. Why is that?

How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?

Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom.

This graph, made by Pingdom, puts it all in perspective:

As you can tell from the graph, put together using global visitor stats for more than three million websites, Google’s near-100% piece of the mobile search pie is even a good deal larger than their still impressive share of the overall search engine market. Note that the red bars represent non-mobile search market share, not a combination of both.

As for Yahoo, Bing, and the ‘others’ – good luck taking on Google on that front.

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App store analytics provider Distimo in its latest report once again focuses on in-app purchases across a variety of mobile application stores, Apple’s App Store in particular.

According to Distimo, the percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the App Store for iPad (10%) compared to that for the iPhone (2%).

One of the main reasons for that, still according to the startup, is the fact that the App Store for iPad became available after in-app purchases were introduced, contrary to the App Store for iPhone. Another reason to take into consideration is that the iPad may currently be used more as a media consumption device than the iPhone, with magazine and newspaper publishers selling much of their content as in-app purchases.

Evidently, the fact that there are more applications available for the iPhone than for the iPad also skews the numbers.

(Click image for full size)

In any event, the Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of applications with in-app purchases available, the startup posits.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone were MobiTV and ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup, which isn’t surprising considering there was this little event called the World Cup going on.

As for paid applications: the apps that saw the strongest level of monetization with in-app purchases this month in the App Store for iPhone were Guitar Hero, TomTom U.S.A. and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II.

Pages and iBooks (both apps are published by Apple) are both, again, the number one paid and free applications on the Apple App Store for iPad in terms of total download numbers.

Netflix for iPad, introduced back in April, is the second most popular free iPad app, while RSS reading app Pulse comes in at second place in the paid applications ranking.

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“All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis.” So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who’s also an nmap developer, is under fire from certain sections of the Internet for creating and uploading a torrent that contains more than 100 million Facebook users’ information. The thing is, all of this information was already publicly available in the Facebook directory. So to call him a “hacker,” well, would be incorrect.

Elon Musk certainly hasn’t been on the down-low lately. Well, with the Tesla’s IPO and then Toyota huge investment and manufacturing deals. Then there’s the lawsuits and his devoice. So yeah, it’s no wonder that Jon Favreau modeled his Tony Stark character after Elon — or so says Wikipedia.

But last night he had a friendly fireside chat with Stephen Colbert, where it was really nothing more than reading of the man’s resume and talking about his ventures. Of course Colbert talked circles around the PayPal co-founder as he tends to do. It’s not like The Colbert Report is known as a hard-hitting news program anyway. That’s more the style of The Daily Show. Click through for the video.

According to GetJar, its eponymous mobile app store is now seeing three million downloads per day. GetJar reiterated that its stats put it second only to Apple iTunes, with over 1 billion total downloads to date. At current (self-reported) growth rate, the company should hit 2 billion downloads in about a year, if calculated on the back of a virtual envelope.

Lovefilm, the Netflix-of-Europe, looks set to beef up its multi-platform play via a newly signed agreement with DRM and adaptive streaming technology provider Widevine. The deal will see the US-based company become Lovefilm's "preferred provider of digital rights management and video optimisation solutions", enabling the video subscription service to continue to break out from its 'DVDs by post' legacy into the video-on-demand market, ensuring that its digital content is "playable on many new devices."

Motorola has just announced its financial results for Q2 2010, reporting total sales of $5.4 billion, which is slightly below what it recorded in the same period last year. Earnings came in at $162 million or $0.07 per share, compared to GAAP earnings of $26 million or $0.01 per share in Q2 2009.

Non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.09 compared to earnings of $0.03 per share in second quarter 2009. Analysts expected the company to have earned 8 cents per share on revenue of $5.19 billion.

Zooming in on its Mobile Devices unit, Motorola reported sales of $1.7 billion, down 6 percent compared with the year-ago quarter.

The company shipped a total of 8.3 million handsets last quarter, 2.7 million if which were smartphones – its line-up consists of 12 such devices, including the Droid and Droid X.

GAAP operating earnings for the Mobile Devices business were $87 million, which included income from a significant legal settlement of $228 million (presumably with Blackberry maker Research In Motion), compared to an operating loss of $287 million in the same period a year earlier.

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Double rainbow awesome. There’s no other modern way to describe this.

I won’t spoil it too much, but whatever you do today, visit this website and select some of your closest friends from your Facebook graph when prompted. You won’t be disappointed.

From the looks of it, this was put together by Swiss telecoms provider Swisscom to promote its TV offerings. Hat tip to Ouriel Ohayon.

Awesomeness in a bottle.

Update: sorry if it’s slow or down for you, site must be getting slammed right now.

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Mobile phone maker HTC this morning announced a series of executive promotions and newly created management positions.

The Taiwanese company said it had poached two senior execs from rival Sony Ericsson and that it had promoted three others to its management team. Buried in the press release, however, is that a senior executive of its own has quit the company.

In a statement, HTC announced that it appointed Ron Louks as chief strategy officer, a new position that will oversee HTC’s strategic planning and technology development. Louks was previously CTO at Sony Ericsson. HTC also appointed Kouji Kodera as chief product officer, putting him in charge of the company’s global product planning and management. Kodera was also previously a senior executive at Sony Ericsson, where he was head of products also.

HTC added that it had promoted David Chen, previously vice president of product development and the second employee ever to have been hired by the company, to chief engineering officer.

Previously VP of HTC North America, Jason Mackenzie has been promoted to president of HTC North America and Latin America, while Florian Seiche has been promoted from VP to president of HTC EMEA.

As mentioned before, HTC has also lost a key senior executive. Jason Juang, formerly executive vice president at the company, has apparently quit to “pursue other opportunities”.

We’ll be very curious to find out where he’s headed next.

We’ve updated HTC’s CrunchBase profile to reflect the changes.

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Zynga issued a press release tonight confirming the more than month-old news of an investment by Softbank – $150 million – and are announcing a joint venture to “develop and distribute social games across Japan.”

Zynga didn’t talk about the other $150 million they took from Google in connection with a partnership over the new Google Games property. Although they soft-confirmed it to the New York Times in a recent article about the company.

Zynga has raised a whopping $519 million in venture capital, including that chunk from Google. Here’s the press release:

ZYNGA AND SOFTBANK CORP. LAUNCH JOINT VENTURE TO ACCELERATE SOCIAL GAME INDUSTRY IN ASIA

SOFTBANK INVESTS $150 MILLION IN ZYNGA

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO – July 29, 2010 – Zynga and Softbank today announced a joint venture that will develop and distribute social games across Japan. The new joint venture, Zynga Japan, brings together leaders in social games and consumer technology to offer millions of new users the ability to play social games anytime and anywhere. In conjunction with today’s announcement, Softbank has completed a $150 million investment in Zynga. With this agreement, Zynga and Softbank will tighten their relationship as business partners.

The joint venture extends Zynga’s reach to a wider global audience and marks the company’s first foray into the rapidly growing internet and mobile market in Japan. Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will tap into Japan’s rich history of gaming and leverage Softbank’s cutting edge mobile and Web technology to produce the best social games in the market.

“Zynga is a leader in social games and I am delighted to partner with them to introduce their social games to Japan,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank. “We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse.”

“We’re excited to partner with Softbank to bring Zynga’s social games to Japan and gain insights from the Japanese market,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder of Zynga. “As one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Softbank is bringing the mobile internet to consumers making the social web more accessible to people everywhere.”

###

About Zynga
Zynga’s games include FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Café World, FishVille, PetVille and FrontierVille. Zynga games are available on Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. Through Zynga.org, Zynga players have raised over $3 million for world social causes. Zynga is headquartered in Potrero Hill in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.Zynga.com or www.Zynga.org.

About Softbank
Softbank is a leading technology company connecting consumers through its broadband infrastructure, fixed-line telecommunications, and mobile communications services. Softbank has invested in overseas companies with high potential to provide next generation services using the internet, including Oak Pacific Interactive (which operates China’s largest SNS site), and Ustream, Inc. (which is the operator of the Ustream.TV website), a broadcast platform offering live video distribution service via the Internet (video streaming service). By leveraging this investment in Zynga and through its other efforts, Softbank continuously aims to generate synergies among various content and services within its group. For more information, visit http://www.softbank.co.jp/en/.

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People don’t send postcards anymore. Why bother when you can photo MMS a friend? Attempting to restore some of the social experience behind photography, SwingVine has created SwingVine Gallery, an app that attempts to bring back some of the mystique and enjoyment of social photo sharing.

Using your iPhone’s camera and GPS, the SwingVine Gallery app allows you to send a photo to a friend “secretly,” a photo that they are unable to see unless they also participate by sending a photo back, sort of like a mobile game of photo tag.

While both the idea and the app interface are simple, SwingVine gallery does have its appeal, as it’s pretty hard to resist wanting to see whatever photo postcard is under wraps. I genuinely felt a level of excitement as I waited for my “secret” postcard to be revealed (It was, of course, a photo of the Eiffel Tower).

The app, expected to arrive in the app store within the next 24 hours, also functions as a photo album, with all the secret photos you receive being saved alongside your own personal photos. “Our goal is capturing people’s lives visually” says co-founder Ling Bao.

For those that can’t wait until it drops, you can try out the feature on the web here.

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Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the second iteration came in 2009 with a sleeker look, I decided to buy one to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly learned to love it.

That said, I still didn’t see any real future for such a product. At $359, it was still absurdly expensive. And with all the rumors swirling about Apple’s impending tablet device, it seemed like it was a temporary niche product, at best. But on the eve of the unveiling of the third iteration of the device, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is making things more interesting.

Specifically, Bezos seems to understand that he cannot compete with the iPad. And he doesn’t want to. “Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution,” he continues.

Whether you believe that or not, it goes against reports from last year that Amazon was trying to figure out how best to compete against more advanced tablets by offering features such as color screens. Bezos even said that they had them in the laboratory to test out. But he also said that they weren’t ready for prime time, so color Kindles were at least a few years away.

But his new statements seems to indicate that Amazon may never go in that direction with the Kindle. If their goal is just to focus on making the best reading device, why go with color and video, is his reasoning. Here’s his killer quote from the WSJ piece:

For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.

That’s a smart position to take — for now. From a consumer hardware perspective, Amazon was never going to be able to compete with Apple — they simple lack the experience. So instead, Amazon is going to forge ahead with this dedicated device in hopes that it will catch on with mainstream consumers before the more expensive tablets do.

Naturally, the key to all of this is the price. The new Kindle will come in two flavors: a 3G one for $189 and a WiFi one for $139. The latter price is almost a full third less than the original Kindle was. It’s also a much, much cheaper than the entry-level iPad at $499. $99 still seems like the ultimate sweet-spot for the Kindle, but it’s hard to argue with $139.

The problem here is that I’m not convinced Amazon really wanted to go that low. Remember that it was only hours after Barnes & Noble announced their Nook would be $199 (and $149 for the WiFi version) that Amazon dropped their price from $259 all the way down to $189 — exactly $10 cheaper. Undoubtedly, Amazon has lowered the costs associated with the making the Kindle over the past three years, but $399 to $189 is pretty dramatic.

Everyone felt the Kindle was far too expensive at $399 or $359 but Amazon still resisted the pressure to lower the price quickly. The reason? They had complete control of the market — they didn’t have to. It was only when the Nook, Border’s Kobo, and the iPad came out that the prices truly started to fall fast.

So the question now: is Amazon making any money on selling these devices? Some may think that doesn’t matter because they’re Amazon’s way to move their content (pretty much the anti-Apple approach). But as Bezos points out, the Kindle store and the Kindle hardware are completely separate entities within Amazon. “Internally, we view them as two stand-alone businesses that have to succeed on their own merits,” he tells WSJ. Can selling the Kindle hardware at such a low price fulfill that?

The larger problem remains for Amazon as well. While the Kindle is undoubtedly easier on the eyes than reading with the backlit iPad, the wide range of things that the iPad and other tablets can do will eventually win the day. Amazon’s price cuts have extended that day quite a bit, but it’s still inevitable.

So is Amazon content to rule the space for a couple of years while not making a lot of money on devices? Or is Bezos simply bluffing on Amazon’s future Kindle aspirations?

Also, does anyone really think Hemingway would have been pleased with his work on a Kindle?

[image via]

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Local deal goliath Groupon is launching a major new feature today: deal personalization, giving the site the ability to send you the deals it thinks you’ll be most interested in. Before now, Groupon has always offered one or two deals per city per day to its users. That’s still going to be true, but with a twist: the site will be sending different deals to users based on criteria like their gender, buying history, and their interests. The change may sound fairly minor, but it will likely have a big impact on Groupon’s bottom line.

Groupon’s simplicity has no doubt contributed to its success, but this is one case where it has some very good reasons for introducing a few extra options: personalization will help the site fend off the 500 clones that are gunning for it, it will allow Groupon to offer an unlimited number of deals, and the site can now offer deals from businesses located outside of large cities. Local personalization is rolling out to six cities for now (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle), with the rest on the way.

CEO Andrew Mason says that one reason why there are so many Groupon clones is that the site simply hasn’t been able to accommodate all of the businesses looking to serve up a local deal, leading the businesses to turn a competitor. Deal personalization changes this, because Groupon can now distribute multiple deals in the same city on a given day. Where Groupon was previously limited to one deal (and maybe a second so-called “side deal”) per day, it can now offer as many deals as it has eager businesses.

Again, to users, this won’t be readily apparent. When you sign up you’ll be asked for your zip code and gender, and Groupon will also allow you to specify if there are any particular types of deals you’re interested in. But there’s a good chance most people will have no idea that they’re receiving a different deal than their neighbors — they’ll still receive their daily deal in their inbox, and there won’t be a button to see the dozen other deals that might be available in that city. Deals will be distributed based on a personalization algorithm (Mason said they hired someone from Netflix to build it).

Of course, that could introduce a problem: you may ask a friend if they’ve gotten in on the latest Groupon, only to find that you’ve both got different coupons. To remedy this, Mason says that you’ll still be able to send any Groupons you receive to your friends.

In addition to allowing for an unlimited number of deals, the new system gives Groupon more flexibility behind the scenes. First, it can allow companies to stagger their deals, offering it multiple times over the course of a few months to different buckets of users.

It also allows the site to offer deals to businesses from smaller cities. Groupon has historically only offered deals to businesses in major metropolitan areas — San Francisco, New York, etc. But plenty of users who might sign up for San Francisco deals live in a suburb, like Palo Alto. Now Groupon can identify which users live in those suburbs based on their zip codes, and send them deals from businesses in Palo Alto. This is going to be part of a broader trend for the site, which is shifting from “What’s your city?” to “What’s your zip code?”.

And all of this has one other nice side effect: the deals landing in your inbox should be more relevant to what you’re actually interested in.