At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

In computer terms, a message bus carries data between different parts of a computer or between different computers. Realtime streams can be thought of as a micro-message bus which carries information instantaneously between people. The power of a micro-message is its ability to carry data, usually in the form of a link. It is a vehicle for passing links and other information. The value of a Tweet or status update or a Yammer or a Wave is not only in what it conveys about the sender, but where it leads to.

Other kinds of data can take a ride on this micro-message bus as well. Geolocation data, photos and videos are among the most popular. Whoever is in the driver’s seat of this micro-message bus will be in an enviable position, which is why everyone is trying to clamor aboard in hopes of taking over the wheel.

Next week, at our Realtime Crunchup (tickets are still available), we’ll be examining how this new communications layer on the Internet is being built and who will be driving the bus. We hope you can join us.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jan Krutisch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

A speech recognition and transcription service called Moji Moji TV was selected as “Best Startup” of the IVS Fall 2009 Launch Pad (that ended just now). Here are short profiles of all the services that demo’d at the event. (Please note some of the companies have yet to launch homepages in English, but some do offer globalized services, too.)

One Winner and five runners-up:
Moji Moji TV by Catalog (winner of the demo pad)
Best of show went to Moji Moji TV, which appears to be a very powerful speech recognition and transcription service for videos launched in private alpha last month. The engine supports Japanese only, but English and Chinese versions are in the works. Moji Moji extracts audio from a video (self-made movies, YouTube clips etc.) and automatically displays the spoken words as text, which then can be edited by the users. The text can be used to tag and sub movies, and it’s also possible to search for certain words or expressions within them. There’s also an iPhone app called Shabetter that automatically transcribes what you say into the iPhone mic and posts it to Twitter. More information on Moji Moji TV in English can be found here.

This video (in English) shows how Moji Moji TV works:

V-Sido by Wataru Yoshizaki (runner-up)
Most robots used for entertainment, in research and other areas have one common problem: They can only move in a slow, mechanical and chopping motion. Developed by robot fanatic Wataru Yamazaki, V-Sido is a software-based, real-time control system for humanoids that helps make them move smoother.

Spysee by Ohma (second runner-up)
Spysee is a person search engine whose English version launched at TechCrunch 50 this year (Spysee was a demo pit company). A Chinese version is in the works. The service pulls information and media on individuals from the web and presents them on a person-specific page (example: Barack Obama). Spysee’s original Japanese version went live last year and has gone through several iterations since. One example is the way Spysee monetizes its service now: It allows users to donate real money to individuals who need help in funding their personal goals (Cheering Spysee), getting a cut of the donation in return.

m-police by milog (third runner-up)
m-police is a fully automatized site monitoring system that’s able to detect profanity, insults and “legally problematic” sentences on the web and subdivides relevant expressions into 16 different categories. The company says about 5% of all posts in the Japanese blogosphere can be regarded as being relevant for m-police, and 22% of those can be called potentially dangerous. Some Japanese social networks employ up to 300 “surveillance officers” to keep their sites clean. m-police can push down costs from 6 Yen (7 cent) per post monitored by human beings to 3 Yen.

AEGISGUARD by KLab (fourth runner-up)
AEGISGUARD is anti-virus software that’s not only free to download but also completely available in English. The main purpose of the program is to protect your important files and folders from viruses (of which more than 5 million exist today) and malware by granting only white-listed programs access to them. AEGISGUARD developer KLab says this way, unknown or new viruses are effectively fenced out. The solution can be installed with conventional, blacklist-based antivirus software on the same PC.

Symphonic Motion by AITIA (fourth runner-up)
Symphonic Motion is an augmented reality-based entertainment engine that’s not designed for mobile devices for a change but rather for large-sized displays (that can be several meters in diameter). The technology uses “physical” AR, meaning you can get in front of the camera and move CG elements you see on the screen around by moving your arms, for example. Maker AITIA is marketing the solution as interactive, fun digital signage applications to corporations, exhibitions and event organizers (demo movie).

The six other demo companies:
OpenSocial Host by HeartRails
OpenSocial Host is an integrated platform for developing, distributing and managing OpenSocial applications, e.g. for sites like MySpace, hi5 or Japan’s biggest social network Mixi.(which opened its site for external developers back in September this year). OpenSocial Host supports mobile apps, offers paid and free options, but it’s Japanese only.

Location Amplifier by Koozyt
The key idea behind Location Amplifier is to “amplify” the real world by pushing “rich”, location-based content onto mobile phones, for example location-based games or guides. At IVS, maker Koozyt demonstrated how a person’s movements can be tracked even inside buildings (where GPS regularly fails). It’s also possible to use Location Amp to walk from exhibit to exhibit in a museum and let your mobile device tell you what you’re currently looking at (demo movies). The technology is based on PlaceEngine, a service that relies on Wi-Fi to estimate your location, even when there’s no GPS.

Zeke CMS Social Game Kit by Ubiquitous Entertainment
Ubiquitous Entertainment CEO Ryo Shimizu demo’d Zeke CMS Social Game Kit, a (Japanese-only) platform for developing games to be deployed in social networks like Facebook or Japan’s biggest social network Mixi. One of the games that was built using the system is called “Tokyo Treasure”, a scavenger hunt, which combines AR elements with the real world, using the iPhone camera (”It’s game over when you’re tagged!”).

Droidget AR by GClue
Droidget AR was described as the world’s first widget framework for augmented reality services on Android. These widgets can be “picked up” at the physical place where they’ve been left by other people and used instantly, without the user having to access the web. Example: When you’re in a restaurant, switch on the camera on your Android phone, point it at the door and click on the AR tag you see to instantly access the menu (demo movies).

Jitsu Kuukan Toushi Keitai by KDDI au one Labs
KDDI, Japan’s second biggest telecommunications company, presented an augmented reality application that launched in June this year for a limited number of Japanese cell phones. Their Jitsu Kuukan Toushi Keitai app (which roughly translates to: cell phone that allows real space transparency) works just like many of the other mobile AR apps out there. It uses GPS, the phone’s camera, 6-axis sensor and screen to locate where you are and point you to where you want to go through tags. But if you point the phone to a wall or a human being, you can also “see through” them, meaning the app will display tags located behind them.

This video shows how Toushi Keitai’s “see-through” function works:

Odette Solution by ORSO
Odette Solution lets you create mobile Flash sites (nearly 100% of Japanese mobile phones have Flash Lite installed). The Japanese-only, cloud-based ASP service offers various templates whose elements you can edit in various ways, for example by drag and drop. But you can also create mobile web pages by putting together different elements. Odette Solution will be launched next spring.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This time, TokyoCamp gave a total of 29 startups from three Asian countries (Japan, Singapore and Korea) the chance to present their services to Japan’s leading journalists, fellow entrepreneurs, top-level VCs and TechCrunch readers. Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all companies that were present at the event. (Here is my report on the first TokyoCamp that took place in August this year.)

Demos from TechCrunch50 alumni from Singapore, Korea and Japan

iTwin
Singapore-based iTwin was one of the two non-Japanese startups demoing at TokyoCamp (it’s a spin-off from A*STAR, a Singapore government-funded research agency). Their two-part USB drive iTwin, showed to the world at TechCrunch50 in September, is intended to be a “cable-less cable”. After connecting the iTwin to a computer, you can give one part of it to someone else who’ll have remote access (over the web) to the computer via his own computer.

iTwin’s Kal Takru told me his company is currently plans to release the device in five to six months, with the price likely to be $99 including worldwide shipping. Initially, the iTwin will be available online only – even though following TechCrunch50, the company was bombarded with inquiries from retail chains all over the world.

Sealtale
Social widget service Sealtale was Tokyocamp’s guest from South Korea and another TechCrunch50 finalist. Sealtale users can express their interests, preferences or causes via so-called seals (interactive widgets). Once these seals are integrated into your blog or social network page, you can communicate with other people who have the same interests as you within the seal itself (via RSS feeds, comments, posts, audio and video files). Sealtale works across various blog platforms and social networks.

The three members of the six-man company (all of whom are college students) who were invited to Tokyo told me they now feel there’s life before TechCrunch50 and after. Following TC50, Sealtale in South Korea apparently got a boost in terms of user base, massive media attention (the service was even featured on national TV) and increased interest from brands and companies. Just one example: Sealtale was chosen as a partner for a media campaign in Korea’s political space and distributed more than 120,000 seals to users all over the country in the process. Sealtale’s major global roll-out is planned for the middle of next year.

Spysee
Tokyo-based people search engine Spysee launched its English version during TechCrunch50 in September (the service was in the TC50 demopit). You can use it to look for any person on the web, with Spysee scraping various information on that person off the web (bio, news, blog posts, videos, related individuals etc.) and displaying it on a single page (example: Barack Obama’s Spysee entry).

LIFEmee
LIFEmee is a life management service that allows you to store and share the significant aspects and events of your life online (from “the cradle to the crave”). You can keep a diary, list up significant events in your life (career history, places you lived in, hobbies etc.), share your future plans, manage assets, store your last will or compare certain elements of your life with other LIFEmee users.

The service launched at TechCrunch50 (LIFEmee presented at the demo pit) in English. The LIFEmee team has since been working on localizing the service into Japanese and collecting early user feedback for the English version to optimize features and functions.

Demos from Japanese startups

Joker Racer
Joker Racer, a service that just recently won the Grand Prix at another big demo event in Tokyo, lets users from all over the world control Wi-Fi- and GPS-enabled models cars through the browser or iPhone (in real-time). The cars are customized and offered by JokerWorks, the new company behind the service, itself. A bunch of videos can be found here.

But at TokyoCamp, CEO Yoski Akamatsu presented the “Joker Racer R/C Server” for the first time, the world’s first linux server exclusively designed for R/C model cars to be controlled over the web (specs and more pics here). This means you can buy the mini server, connect it with your own R/C car, and then control the car using its standard servo/speed controllers and a mounted standard web camera.

For end users, the server’s final price and release date are yet to be determined. But JokerWorks already accepts inquiries from event organizers and advertising and promotion agencies.

Lang-8
Youyou Ki, CEO of Lang-8, showed a revamped version of his award-winning language learning site whose interface is available in 14 languages. The main idea is to let users write in the language they’re learning and have native speakers of that language correct the text (this video shows how this works). Lang-8 users can get in touch with each other directly through the site, too. The service is free.

Cerevo Cam
I’ve written an extensive article on the Cerevo Cam, a digital camera that automatically uploads pictures to various social media sites via Wi-Fi or 3G, in late August. Now, roughly nine weeks later, the device is finally priced (just under 20,000 Yen/$220) and dated. The Cerevo Cam and Cerevo Life, a photo management site specifically designed for buyers of the camera, will be available at the beginning of next month. CEO Takuma Iwasa is still determined to sell the camera outside Japan but couldn’t give me details.

At TokyoCamp, I tried out a fully working prototype, which instantly uploaded pictures to a nearby panel computer via a 3G modem stick plugged into the camera.

HaaLee
HaaLee isn’t a web startup, but the company, whose team is based out of China, Japan and the US, showed a pretty cool blue-tooth stereo headset that does not plug-up the ears. Instead, users are supposed to place the speakers against the skin just in front of the ears. The idea is to be able to listen to music on your cell phone or portable media player while still being able to hear sounds around you. HaaLee is currently in discussions with various brand companies and carriers to take the headset to market.

Jingoo
Tokyo-based MetaCast presented Jingoo at Tokyo Camp, a Japanese-only add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer. Once installed, Jingoo occupies a column on the right of your browser window (”Jingoo Zone”) that allows you to access customized apps that are supposed to make your life on the web easier. These apps (there are 17 at this point) can be anything from games you can directly play in the “Jingoo Zone”, a clock, maps, shopping tools, a tweet stream etc. Jingoo is free.

Pixiv
Launched in September 2007, the Japanese-only “social illustration” service Pixiv broke the one million member mark in June this year (it’s currently ranked at 60 in Alexa Japan). Users (talented amateur artists, pros and art enthusiasts) spend more than 13 minutes on the site per visit, submitting 15,000 drawings per day on average and discussing them in a social network that’s built around the drawings.

Here’s how a typical drawing, submitted by a Pixiv member, looks (each piece gets a dedicated page):

The free site makes money mainly through display ads and premium memberships ($6 per month) but also organizes real life events. Learn more about Pixiv in the excellent English Wikipedia entry.

Patent Bureau
Patent Bureau is a technology media company that aims at automating the process of delivering relevant technology and intellectual properties information in real-time. The company claims their interactive data base, dubbed astamuse (Japanese only), is being used by patent offices in Japan for trial decisions and court precedents for intellectual patent cases. astamuse wants to be the ultimate destination site for anybody involved in creating, using and managing technology and intellectual properties to explore their territory. Patent Bureau is currently working on covering additional languages.

Rigureto
Rigureto is a free community and communication platform through which users can anonymously express and share their negative feelings (i.e. “I just lost my girl friend.”) with other users who can then post messages of comfort (i.e. “Don’t worry, you’ll soon find another one.”). This happens virtually in real-time, as it usually seems to be a matter of a few minutes or even seconds to get a reaction. Think an online, crowdsourced Dear Abby (even though some users post just in order to communicate with other human beings – and it usually works). Rigureto users receiving positive comments can thank other members by sending them “arigatou” points, which can later be redeemed on the site. The service is Japanese only at this point.

UserHeat
UserHeat is an in-page web analytics tool that visualizes user behavior in three different ways (mouse movement tracking, clicking behavior and “gazed” area, an educated guess of which areas of a given page were viewed the most). Install the tool on your web site, wait for a certain period of time to analyze how visitors use it (1,000 to 1,500 page views are apparently the minimum) and let UserHeat display the result via “thermographic” images that are superimposed over your site (sample heat map for a Japanese site selling contact lenses). The service is available in English, Chinese and Japanese, and it’s free.

Notable mentions

Here are the 16 other services demo’d at the TokyoCamp event: fabric video (a video delivery system to be made available next year), MOT (an ASP business tool), Photiva (a digital signage solution), Tabereko (an iPhone app for gourmets), Wombit (a Wi-Fi-enabled touch panel computer currently being developed by Tokyo-based Omnibit), Ataritsuki CM (a solution that links TV commercials to the web), Speeda (a database that users can access to get structured economic data in an SaaS-like model), Orihime (an online shop set up by a college student who sells self-designed and made-in-Japan PC bags and cases), AdLantis (an online ad management system), Cognitive Function Balancer (a piece of interactive software for self-test and training for mild cognitive impairment), Phroni (a Firefox add-on that displays information on keywords you highlight on a web page), RainbowApps (a platform that allows you to list up your iPhone apps and discover which apps other iPhone owners have installed), Conit (an iPhone app developer), Istpika (a social gaming company developing for Facebook, iPhone and other platforms), Pankaku (one of Japan’s most successful iPhone app development companies) and Linkthink (an entertainment content provider).

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies and Nikkei Digital Core for making TokyoCamp a success. Special thanks to TechCrunch50 finalists and Asian guests iTwin and Sealtale for the journey to Tokyo. Another TokyoCamp might follow very soon!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I’m delighted to announce the TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, which will be held on Friday, November 6. TokyoCamp 2009 is co-organized by by DESIGN IT!, LLC. (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).

There’s going to be a demo pit (no less than 21 of Japan’s finest startups will demo their wares) and a meetup/networking party afterward.

Registration is required for both events. Here are the details:

TokyoCamp 2009

Demopit
Date: November 6, 2009
Time: Demopit 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Venue: Nikkei Shimbun 2F SPACE NIO*
Fee: Free

Meetup
Date: November 6, 2009
Time: Meetup 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Venue: Manhattan Bleu (B2 floor of Sankei Kaikan, 2 buildings away from Nikkei HQ / Google Maps)
Fee: 6,000 yen

Use this entry form to register.

Please note that we are extremely restricted on numbers this time, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t get on the guest list (TokyoCamp 2009 is strictly an “invitation-only” event). We hope everyone has a great evening and are looking forward to seeing you all on November 6!

Update:
Registration is closed.

*
SPACE NIO, 2nd floor, The Nikkei Head Office
1-3-7, Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo Metro Otemachi station: Take exit C2ba for The Nikkei Head Office

Don’t confuse this new location with the old Nikkei Head Office at 1-9-5 Otemachi.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

As in many parts of Asia, the 800-pound gorilla in the web arena is Yahoo: The company established Yahoo Taiwan as early as 2000 after a buy-out and acquired Wretch, a wildly popular platform for blogging and sharing media, in 2007. Today, these two sites are the biggest in the country, with Facebook following as the No. 3 (Facebook now has 3.9 million users in Taiwan).

But the country does have promising tech start-ups with a global focus, too, some of which I talked with earlier this week during a (private) trip to Taipei. The TechCrunch/Crunchgear meetup on Monday, organized together with partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting (a local innovation strategy firm), was a blast. Over 120 people attended the meetup despite of a typhoon that traveled through Taiwan that day (we actually had to stop registration after a few hours due to space restrictions). Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO sponsored the event.

A total of six Taiwan-based startups were given the chance to pitch their services (all are available in English) to the audience. Here’s a rundown on all of these companies.

Startup 1:
Swagly
Swagly, which calls itself a word-of-mouth affiliate network, is targeting a multi-billion dollar market: the monetization of social networks and video sharing platforms. The key idea is to let people buy what they see in pictures and videos via a product-tagging widget. This widget is placed right below the pictures or videos, with the social network users tagging products themselves (demo).

If a friend sees a user-tagged Gucci bag in an album photo, for example, the Swagly widget will show details of the bag and where the friend can buy it (Swagly works with a slew of American retailers by integrating with Commission Junction and LinkShare). In the case of a click or sell-through, Swagly shares the revenue with the publisher and the user who tagged the product.

Startup 2:
DragNTalk by Taroko Technology
DragNTalk is what appears to be a quite powerful application that makes it possible to project presentations (and other documents) onto nearby computers just by using drag and drop. The software automatically displays presentation materials as web pages in your browser. And all you need to do to share a presentation is to share a local web address with your listeners in a local network (details).

You can then drag and drop any kind of file into the DragNTalk pane and go through your slides just like you do in Powerpoint, for example. The application lets you take snapshots of materials that are available in unsupported formats to be able to share these, too. Listeners can view the presentation you give in their browser windows.

DragNTalk is currently available as a trial edition, with a USB-powered wallet-size wireless router supporting the application in the works (people connecting through the Wi-Fi network spawned by the router will then be able to see the presentations automatically).

Startup 3:
Ragic
5-man startup Ragic wants to take on big enterprise solution companies like Salesforce with a dead simple database creation tool that’s based on a spreadsheet UI. Ragic claims their users can build a full-scale enterprise application like Salesforce’s account management system by themselves in about an hour – without any coding. Alternatively, users can customize and deploy applications offered by Ragic, i.e. their issue tracking or employee management solutions (Ragic’s own account management system is here).

The six applications Ragic currently offers are free to use for a limited time and are as easy to use as Excel. The company earns money by charging customers on a monthly basis (just like Salesforce in the form of a Platform as a Service model) and selling OEM licenses to web design companies.

Startup 4:
Starmugs
Starmugs was surely the most unusual of the demo companies presenting at the TechCrunch Taipei event. The site sees itself as the primary online destination for all lovers of Starbucks City Mugs, apparently quite popular collectible coffee mugs Starbucks started selling in 1994. If you’re one of these people, Starmugs lets you list up, display, trade and share stories about your mugs. The site even has its own virtual currency (Mug Cash).

Startup 5:
Citiport
Launched at DEMO last year, Citiport can roughly be described as a mix between Yelp and TripAdvisor. The site offers travelers “insider information” on the best places to visit in cities around the world. The idea is to collect recommendations on so-called “hotspots” (restaurants, bars, nightlife, shopping, sightseeing, hotels etc.) from people who live in these cities. These locals can be contacted directly on the site and may be ready to help travelers get around in real life as local tour guides.

Startup 6:
YusReader by Cloudonline Technology
YusReader is a nifty full-content RSS reader and sharing platform. The site encourages you to log in with your Facebook account, as YusReader makes it possible to find blogs read by your Facebook friends and share your own favorite blogs with them. The site is also pre-populated with blogs grouped in several categories (sports, lifestyle etc.), but allows you to add your own RSS feeds, too.

Each blog is displayed as an icon in a customizable grid-view. Click on the icon to view the blog in a full browser window where you’ll find a YusReader bar at the top. You can choose the blog you want to read via a drop-down menu and quickly browse through the articles from that blog by scrolling up and down with your mouse.

Event sponsor:
IPEVO
Founded in Taipei, Taiwan & San Jose, California in July 2007, IPEVO creates devices that expand and enhance the overall experience over the Internet. Renowned for its iconic line of VoIP and Skype hardware, IPEVO has established a reputation for innovating award-winning designs and affordable products to help make the Internet a better place for what matters most–connecting, communicating, and sharing with the world around us.

IPEVO’s current product line includes the best-selling So20 Wifi phone for Skype and the Kaleido R7, a digital frame that features a unique pivoting display design and comes bundled with EyeStage software to wirelessly stream Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other Internet contents from a PC or Mac to the frame. Available in late October, the Point 2 View USB Camera (pictured below) is a 2.0 Megapixel, PC & Mac compatible webcam that sits on a versatile swing-arm stand.

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies, co-organizer Chili Consulting and sponsor IPEVO. xie xie! You can find many more pictures of the event here (courtesy of Chili Consulting).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.

Please note you can’t register for this invitation-only event anymore – sorry.

Special thanks again to Chili Consulting for organizing this meetup. Make sure to follow the company’s Facebook page and blog for any last-minute updates (which are very unlikely to happen).

I’m looking forward to seeing over 100 TechCrunch readers and a handful of selected Taiwanese demo companies tomorrow.

Use the hashtag “#tctaipei” when twittering about this event (although I know Plurk is quite big in this country).

Taipei 101 picture taken from Flickr

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Here are the details (in Chinese):

• Event date: October 05 (Monday), 2009
• Time: 7:30pm – 9:30pm (doors open: 7pm)
• Venue: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City
• Fee: NT$250 per person

Register for the event here. Please note that we are restricted on numbers, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t get on the guest list (this is strictly an “invitations only” event).

Please send an email to service [AT] chiliconsulting.com if you’d like to sponsor the event. Do the same if you have something cool and “made in Taiwan” to pitch (i.e. mobile tech, a web service, gadget etc.). Use the hashtag “#tctaipei” when twittering.

Special thanks to Chili Consulting for organizing this meetup (make sure to follow the company’s Facebook page and blog for updates).

We hope everyone has a great night and are looking forward to seeing you all on October 5 in Taipei!

Update:
Thank you very much for the huge interest in this meetup. Please note you can’t register anymore.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

TechCrunch50 has always been very welcoming towards companies from countries other than the US. Last year, for example, a total of five companies from Japan made a showing at the event (three startups presented onstage, two were in the DemoPit).

This year, Korea sent four promising companies to TechCrunch50 (finalist Sealtale, and DemoPit participants UniQube, touchring and FillThat), while Japan had two startups exhibiting in the DemoPit (LIFEmee and Spysee).

These are the four noteworthy Korean services that made it to TechCrunch50 this year:

Sealtale (TechCrunch50 finalist)
Launched by six college students, the Korean version of Sealtale, a social widget service, has attracted 200,000 users in six months (the English version launched Monday on TechCrunch50’s first day). Sealtale lets users express their interests, preferences or causes via so-called seals, which are interactive widgets. You can integrate these seals into your blog or profile page on a social network and interact with other people within the seal itself. The system works across various blog platforms and social networks. The seals can include content like text (RSS feeds, comments, posts), audio and video files.

Sealtale allows you to design and distribute your own seals, too. Companies can create branded seals and use them as viral marketing vehicles. A movie studio, for example, could create a seal for one of its movies and provide trailers and text-based information for users who choose to show that seal on their blog.

Read more about Sealtale in our previous post.

FillThat (DemoPit company)
Monetizing blogs is notoriously difficult. FillThat intends to solve this problem by creating a revenue stream for bloggers within a blog’s commenting space. The way it works is that you buy virtual currency (”Fill Dollars”) with real money and then pay for your comment to boost visibility (it’s also possible to achieve this by taking action, i.e. completing an offer). FillThat will go live next month.

Touchring (DemoPit company)
Touchring wants to bring voice communication into the social space. The Flash app makes it possible to call up friends over so-called Touchrings, cell phone-like icons that you can design yourself and integrate into your blog or profile on various social networks. Calls with other Touchring users are free, but you can also make phone calls to landlines and mobile phones (rates). Touchring launched yesterday.

UniQube (DemoPit company)
Seoul-based Solspectrum showcased UniQube in the DemoPit, an in-stream ad placement solution that’s supposed to help video portals monetize their content. The aim is to enhance brand awareness and customer engagement by integrating interactive ads into video clips or movies at the right moment in a non-intrusive way.

When an actor eats a pizza in a certain scene of a movie, for example, an overlay pizza ad could be displayed. Viewers choosing to click on it could then sign up for a competition or get discount coupons directly within the video without navigating away to another page. Snippets containing the interactive ads can be cut out and sent to friends via Twitter, Facebook and other media. UniQube users can track the distribution paths and effectiveness of their video ads in real-time. The solution is built upon Silverlight and still in development.

These are the two services from Japan that were in the TechCrunch 50 DemoPit:

LIFEmee
LIFEmee is a comprehensive life management service that allows you to store and share the significant aspects and events of your life online (from “the cradle to the crave”). Keep a diary, list up and control personal assets, upload a Last Will and Testament, lay out future plans and compare certain elements of your life, i.e. your annual income, with LIFEmee users around the world.

LIFEmee launched at TechCrunch50 (a Japanese version follows soon). Read more about this service in my previous post.

Spysee
The Japanese version of this people search engine went online last year and instantly gained impressive traction. Much like Spock, Spysee is focused on collecting information on individuals and shedding light on their relation with other people. Type in “Michael Arrington”, for example, and you’ll get a mini bio, a diagram displaying people (relatively) close to him, pictures (i.e. this one), relevant news, keywords, blog posts and video clips. Spysee went live Monday (in beta).

Photo credit: Fumi Yamazaki

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

One of the richest areas of experimentation in search right now is how to rank real-time results. For the most part, that means finding relevance in Twitter and bringing up the most important Tweets for any given keyword (see OneRiot, Collecta,Scoopler). Today, real-time search engine CrowdEye is introducing its own real-time ranking algorithm called CrowdRank. It’s supposed to be like Google’s PageRank, but for the crowd.

Right now,real-time search is Twitter search because that is the richest source of real-time data. And Twitter search is essentially a form of people search. Twitter’s own search engine simply brings back a reverse-chronological list of the most recent Tweets that match the keyword you enter.

CrowdEye does that as well because often in real-time search you just want to see what is happening at this second. But now CrowdEye will let you sort by relevance as well, rearranging results by the most influential people on Twitter. (See screenshots below)

What exactly goes into CrowdRank? CrowdEye founder Ken Moss, who previously was a search guru at Microsoft, won’t reveal all the factors. But the number of followers someone has seems to be the main one. He says:

CrowdEye Rank has many inputs, and the list will be changing over time as we work to refine the algorithm. Obviously it includes things like how many followers you have and whether you are a “verified” twitter account. Less obviously are some factors we use to penalize spammers.

Fortunately, he includes other measures of influence too, like how many times any particular message has been retweeted. Otherwise @aplusk is going to show up at the top of every search.

But now that every person on Twitter has a CrowdRank, when CrowdEye returns results, it shows an actual CrowdRank number between 1 and 100 at the bottom right of each avatar for the top Tweets in results. There is also a directory of the top CrowdRanked Twitter users, but these seem to match up closely to the list of people with the most followers (which again brings us back to to @aplusk problem).

For any given search, CrowdEye returns the top Tweets as well as the top links. Another change today is that if you sign into CrowdEye with your Twitter account, you can follow anybody who comes up in search results or retweet a message without leaving CrowdEye. CrowdEye will also now give you a personalized list of people to follow based partly on who you are already following.

This list is much better. For me it suggested my former Fortune colleague David Kirkpatrick and New York Times reporter Brad Stone (I swear, I thought I was already following you guys—no wait, that’s on Facebook). It also suggests Stocktwits (I’m not really a trader), author Tim Ferris (yes), and MC Hammer (why not?).

And most ambitious of all, CrowdEye will create a personalized homepage showing you links and Tweets tailored for you (see bottom screenshot). It shows you the most Tweeted articles from your favorite pre-selected blogs and news sites or ones which match saved queries. So instead of an empty search box, you are greeted with a bunch of recent content to explore as filtered by both your personal preferences and the collective wisdom (or idiocy) of Twitter.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The occasion: The blog, which is one of Japan’s biggest and mainly translates articles from TechCrunch into Japanese, is under new management (by DESIGN IT!, LLC., a Sociomedia (Japan’s anwer to Adaptive Path) group company).

Here are my thumbnail sketches of all of the twelve demos I saw at Tokyo Camp.

I’vRead by Akky Akimoto
Officially launched at Tokyo Camp, I’vRead keeps a record of all books you’ve read via your Twitter account and lets you find users with a similar taste in books. All you need to do is to type the title of the book (or its ISBN or Amazon URL), add “@ivread” to the tweet and (as an option) write what you thought of it. Each of these tweets will then be automatically added to your personal user page on the I’vRead site (you don’t need to register at the site itself, being a Twitter user is enough). Look here for an example.

dango
dango wants to empower online game creators worldwide to focus more on the development of content and less on the things they have to deal with after a game is finished, especially the distribution problem. The company of the same name offers a comprehensive, integrated framework called “dango-PLAY”. The system delivers online games to a number of social networks (i.e. Facebook or Japan’s Mixi) and dango’s homepage itself, using a single program and source code (dango is open source [JP]).

dango-Play aims at creating an integrated ecosystem for online games by matching users, linking to other games based on the framework, providing SMS services, managing user ID data, freeing developers from tracking user behavior etc. etc.

One of the first games that’s been released based on the dango system is Facebook app “meromero park”, an ultra-cute mix between a social network, a virtual world and a pet-rearing game (the web version has already gained massive popularity in Japan and Taiwan). The Facebook app is available in English and French.

Jin-Magic TCP Traffic Optimization Technology by Akira Jinzaki
A veteran network technology guru and a Chief Technologist in Residence at Breakthrough Partners, Akira Jinzaki has single-handedly programmed what appears to be a powerful TCP traffic controller with the potential to change the way Internet traffic is currently being managed (99% of the Internet traffic is TCP-based). Jinzaki says his Jin-Magic software manages TCP traffic in a cost-effective way that is transparent to the network to get the most out of the exiting plumbing.

The software can sit anywhere in the network between the two end-points. WiMAX was used for the demo. Reception in the demo room was 2 to 4 bars out of 6 and TCP transfer rates were at best 1Mbps (with standard set-up). Turn on the Jin-magic on the server side configured to maximize TCP flow, the rates climbed up in the 4Mbps to 7Mbps range. The technology allows providers to maximize service for their investments. It may enable mobile data providers to serve 2 to 3 times more customers with uninterrupted video bandwidth with the existing infrastructure. Jin-Magic can be ported to smartphones, too.

PeKay’s Little Author
PeKay’s Little Author is a Facebook application that lets users create a graphic story using original characters on-screen and print it out in the form of a picture storybook. Alternatively, the virtual storybook (example) can be shared with others online or turned into a web greeting card.

PeKay’s Little Author is the brainchild of a well-known Japanese artist. The video below shows how the app works:

IxEdit by Sociomedia
Launched at Tokyo Camp, IxEdit is a JavaScript-based “interaction design” tool for web applications that can be used from within the browser. Web designers can use IxEdit to practice DOM-scripting without having to code anything. The tool allows for elements of web pages that require “interaction”, i.e. pull-down menus, to be created with basic knowledge about HTML and CSS (no JavaScript coding is required).

IxEdit can be downloaded for free. View sample elements here.

Mobile Vein Authentication Technology by Universal Robot [JP]
Universal Robot’s compact mobile vein authentication software (40KB core module) can be installed on cell phones, for example, and uses the camera to scan your wrist vein for identification. The technology seems to have many advantages: It works fast (I tried it myself), it’s completely software-based, compatible to a variety of CPUs and operating systems, usable for persons doing hard manual labor (who can’t use fingerprints), and most importantly extremely accurate (the company speaks of a false accept ratio of 0.001% and of a false reject ratio of less than 0.1%). The award-winning software works even with cameras with a 1MP sensor or lower.

Kuchikomi@Sousenkyo [JP] by Hottolink
Tokyo-based Hottolink has shown a self-developed word-of-mouth analysis tool (dubbed “Word Of Mouth@General Election Of The Lower House” in Japanese) that’s supposedly able to predict the results of the general election of Japan’s Lower House (according to CEO Koki Uchiyama) that took place just today.

The prediction tool analyzes what’s being written in Japan’s blogosphere about political topics dynamically (it updates its projected results daily). Uchiyama said internal tests with previous elections proved to be very promising. We’ll know if the prediction model really works on Monday morning Japanese time after the election results are official (I will deliver an update here later).

Update: The prediction proved to be pretty accurate. HottoLink projected the winning party will get 257 seats in Japan’s lower house (it received 221) and the runner-up will get 40 (it received 64 in the end). Accuracy for the election as a whole stands at a good 80.33%.

LogEarth
LogEarth requires a GPS logger or an iPhone GPS logger app to work. The service then records where you move around in the world (provided there’s a GPS signal) and visualizes your route with the help of Google Maps. The log data can be posted on blogs, too.

The 3 Augmented Reality Brothers [JP]
The 3 Augmented Reality Brothers aren’t really brothers, but their augmented reality project certainly had the highest show value at Tokyo Camp. Watch the Japanese video below to get an idea of what these guys are doing (their Vimeo channel is here).

AR3Bros episode-i | twitter & AR from ar3bros on Vimeo.

dodaii by Feynman
dodaii is an in-app purchase management ASP created for iPhone devs. The system handles the payment records for companies offering apps in the App Store for a fee. More information on dodaii can be found in this English PDF and here. dodaii is currently in closed beta.

Kanshin Kuukan [JP]
Kanshin Kuukan is a community site that helps its members find relevant products, restaurants, movies, songs etc. based on recommendations from users. The company of the same name showed a demo video of an iPhone app that scans the Twittersphere for relevant tweets and is scheduled for release in December (Japanese only).

Manetron
Manetron is an iPhone app that puts a Mellotron (an electro-mechanical, vintage keyboard) in your pocket. The app is available in the App Store for $2.99. Watch the video below to see and hear how Manetron works.

Many thanks to all attendees and demo companies who helped making Tokyo Camp a blast. And sorry to everyone who didn’t make it on the guest list this time (just like last time, we were overwhelmed by the response), but another event like this might happen again in the near future. Arigatou gozaimasu!

More pictures from the event were made by alpha blogger Masaki Ishitani and TechCrunch Japan’s translator Umihiko Namekawa.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate DNS process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had ‘the Internet’. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move.

Remarkably, Symbolics.com hasn’t changed ownership once during the nearly 25 years that followed its initial registration. Marking an end to that era, domain name investment company XF.com Investments has just purchased the domain name for an undisclosed sum.

Which calls for a bit of history about the original owner:

Symbolics, Inc – a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab – was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later in Concord, Massachusetts, that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The machines became the first commercially available “general-purpose computers” or “workstations” way before those terms were coined.

The company also offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera for Tru64 UNIX on the HP Alpha.

In the late eighties, the company started its slow descent towards bankruptcy and oblivion, neatly chronicled in this blog post by former Symbolics employee Dan Weinreb:

The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new “workstation” category of computer appeared: the Suns and Apollos and so on. New technology for implementing Lisp was invented that allowed good Lisp implementations to run on conventional hardware; not quite as good as ours, but good enough for most purposes. So the real value-added of our special Lisp architecture was suddenly diminished. A large body of useful Unix software came to exist and was portable amongst the Unix workstations: no longer did each vendor have to develop a whole software suite. And the workstation vendors got to piggyback on the ever-faster, ever-cheaper CPU’s being made by Intel and Motorola and IBM, with whom it was hard for Symbolics to keep up. We at Symbolics were slow to acknowledge this. We believed our own “dogma” even as it became less true. It was embedded in our corporate culture. If you disputed it, your co-workers felt that you “just didn’t get it” and weren’t a member of the clan, so to speak. This stifled objective analysis. (This is a very easy problem to fall into — don’t let it happen to you!)

…

Meanwhile, back at Symbolics, there were huge internal management conflicts, leading to the resignation of much of top management, who were replaced by the board of directors with new CEO’s who did not do a good job, and did not have the vision to see what was happening. Symbolics signed long-term leases on big new offices and a new factory, anticipating growth that did not come, and were unable to sublease the properties due to office-space gluts, which drained a great deal of money. There were rounds of layoffs. More and more of us realized what was going on, and that Symbolics was not reacting. Having created an object-oriented database system for Lisp called Statice, I left in 1988 with several co-workers to form Object Design, Inc., to make an object-oriented database system for the brand-new mainstream object-oriented language, C++.

Symbolics still exists as a shell of its former self. But now the very first .com domain name ever registered becomes property of a small domain name investment holding that is so shy about its identity that it doesn’t publish the names of the people involved with the company, let alone a company address, on its website. There’s absolutely no indication of what the future has in store for the historical domain name, apart from the fact XF.com intends to celebrate its 25th birthday next year.

To quote Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings: “I don’t know why, but it makes me sad.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Facebook just added the ability to invite friends to an event based on who was invited to past events that you’ve been to. The new feature basically lets you filter your friends by recent events when creating an invitee list.

So when you create an event on Facebook, you will now see a “Filter Friends” tab in the upper-left corner. The drop-down menu will display the five most recent events you either created or attended in the past month. If you click on one of these events, you can see the invitee list for this event. Of course, only your friends will appear in this list; you will not be able to see or invite anyone who you aren’t friends with from past lists. One drawback is that you can only access the lists from recent events and can’t see the lists from older events.

You can either invite people individually or select all. The new feature is definitely an easier way to both create an invitee list for an event. Facebook’s event application is massively popular, with the site seeing “2.5 million events created each month”. While Facebook’s event app is growing rapidly, rival social network MySpace has also been steadily boosting its events application and recently overtook Evite, another popular event planning site in number of invitations sent per day.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A service called Joker Racer emerged as the big winner of the evening, but the other presentations weren’t too shabby either, with some of them earning special jury awards from various Japanese media. A good number of the fourteen services are available in English (or will be soon). Here’s a rundown on all of the companies that presented at WISH 2009:

Joker Racer (Winner: Grand Prix and Agile Media Network Award)
Joker Racer lets you remote-control model cars via your browser window, from anywhere in the world and in real-time. The Linux-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled model cars are equipped with GPS, a mini Linux server and a web cam mounted on top of them. It will even be possible to control the cars with the iPhone.

You can already register on the site but have to be patient until the official launch on August 26 when you want to take a spin. More videos can be viewed here.

Cerevo [JP] (Winner: Impress Award)
Cerevo presented an early version of a digital camera designed completely in-house that’s supposed to play with a photo sharing service the company is working on concurrently. The Wi-Fi-enabled “Cerevo cam” automatically uploads pictures to company servers without users needing to do anything. Pictures can then easily shared with friends (via cell phone email, for example) or uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and other sites. Expect both the Japanese and international version to launch probably later this year (read more about Cerevo here).

Action*Pad [JP] (Winner: CNET Japan Award)
Action*Pad is designed to be a simple to-do list that can be accessed by a group of people over the web (both fixed and mobile). Users just need to type in the URL and a password (registration isn’t necessary) to start getting things done. The service hasn’t officially launched yet.

Dressphile [JP] (Winner: Nikkei BP Award)
Dressphile is a combination of an offline and online business. Shopping addicts suffering from a lack of space in their apartments can either send in excess clothing or have it picked up. Dressphile will then store the clothes in its own storage facility at a monthly rate of $3 per item.

The company also offers a cleaning service and online database of your clothes, which are each pictured in a grid view. Dressphile is considering to let users choose to open these personal “online closets” to other people to sell off unneeded clothes that way.

Lang-8 (Winner: IT Media Award)
Lang-8 is a language exchange site with a social networking slant that’s been established in 2007. Available in 14 different languages, Lang-8 focuses on improving the writing skills in the language you study. Blog entries written in a foreign language can be viewed and checked by native speakers of that language. Read more about Lang-8 here.

xtel (Winner: Gizmodo Japan Award)
xtel is the name of a development support system for “ubiquitous contents” provided by Keio University in Tokyo. A total of four modules were presented: MOXA (a small I/O board), Talktic (compiler library for the development of applications on MOXA), Entity Collaborator (Java-based network to create network applications) and LIFE (server solution).

Tons of cool stuff the university created can be found in this bilingual PDF.

CONIT iPhone Content Payment System
CONIT presented a content payment system for the iPhone that should be of interest to many of the iPhone developers out there. The company has developed a solution that reduces costs for those developers offering subscriptions and and in-app purchases with their apps (new and existing ones). The system eliminates the need for setting up a content server. More in the English presentation embedded below.

Yonda4 [JP]
Yonda4 is a service that keeps track of books and comics you’ve read using Twitter. Just type the title of the book and add “@yonda4” to the tweet (it’s also possible to squeeze in a mini review). You can then access the Yonda4 website to see a list of your books and find users who have a similar taste. Android users can scan the barcode of a book and tweet its title instantly with Yonda4’s Android app.

Kokuban.in [JP]
Kokuban.in is a Flash-based “social drawing” service that lets users create images on a virtual blackboard with a mouse, “recording” the process from start to finish. The service launched last year, and there are now hundreds of thousands of animated clips on the site. CEO Yoshinori Munehara mainly talked about a new system that’s supposed to keep “impolite” comments on kokuban.in under control.

User Insight [JP]
User Insight is a web marketing tool that analyzes user behavior on a given site and visualizes the data collected with a heat map. The tool is supposed to answer the question what type of user (sex, age etc.) shows interests in which pages and which parts of those pages are clicked at the most. User Insight will go live next month, with versions in English and Chinese currently being in development.

Sony Bank’s “Jinseitsuuchou/Bankbook Of Your Life” [JP]
Sony Bank (an online bank operated by a Sony Japan subsidiary) presented a personal finance management system called Jinseitsuuchou, which roughly means “bankbook of your life” in Japanese. Just like the many other online finance trackers out there, the Sony tool helps users keep track of their personal expenses and budgets.

30min. [JP]
30min. is a location-based city guide portal that scrapes information on restaurants, shops and other service providers from the blogosphere. Based on where you are, 30min. delivers information on locations accessible within 30 minutes, enhanced by statements taken from blogs (currently, a whopping 8,000 blogs written by individuals are indexed). There’s also a free 30min. iPhone app [JP, iTunes link].

Nissan Carwings [JP]
A Nissan representative summarized the Web-related strengths of Carwings, Nissan’s (still) Japan-only and high-spec car navigation system: Display and text-to-speech conversion of RSS feeds, integration of Google Calendar, display of Google Maps information, integration of gas price comparison portal gogo.gs [JP] etc.

Link Knowledge [JP]
Link Knowledge is what appears to be a pretty powerful SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). The key idea is to scan information from business cards and feed it into a database, which can be accessed by Link Knowledge clients, i.e. direct marketers or sales people, to systematically identify potential customers.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Today we’re pleased to announce Angel investor Ron Conway, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly, and tech blogger Robert Scoble will join us on stage at the event.

They’ll join the already announced Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Yossi Vardi, Kevin Rose and Sean Parker.

And yes, the experts are already jostling for the right to judge the new product that Penn & Teller will be launching at the event. But there are 49 other awesome startups showing their stuff for the first time, too.

Ron, Tim, and Robert were experts last year and have returned based on popular demand. Reid and Tony will be making their first appearances. Additional judges will be announced next week.

All the details for the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is an action-packed conference where fifty new startups launch over two days. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where we packed nearly 2,000 participants last year. Last week we announced Penn & Teller will be attending to launch a new product.

Tickets for the event can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite. We’ve slashed our early-bird prices from 2008 to $1995 through August 31. (Prices escalate to $2,995.) Students interested in volunteering for the event can fill out this form. Additionally, exhibitor passes are available for $8,000, which include entry to the conference for 4 people, a 5’ exhibitor table, and other goodies.

More on the TechCrunch50 blog.

	Ron Conway Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. He was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “deal-makers” in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions (1973-1979), Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO (1979-1990) and took Altos public on Nasdaq in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) (1991-1995). PTS was acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft (Nasdaq SKIL). Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Twitter, Digg.com, Bright Mail, Ask Jeeves, Rupture (acquired by EA), Associated Content, Facebook, RockYou, ScanScout, Zappos, Trulia, StumbleUpon, Plaxo (acquired by Comcast), Photobucket (acquired by Fox), and Anchor Intelligence (co-founder). Philanthropically, Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.
	Reid Hoffman Reid Hoffman is Executive Chairman and a co-founder of LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal where he was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, Reid was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid also has held management roles in significant technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. In addition to LinkedIn, Reid serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart, Kiva.org, and Mozilla Corporation. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy and a Marshall scholarship.
	Tony Hsieh Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com, which was recently acquired by Amazon. Since he joined Zappos full time in 2000 Zappos has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6M to $840M in 2007 by focusing relentlessly on customer service. Prior to joining Zappos, Tony co-founded Venture Frogs with Alfred Lin. Venture Frogs is an incubator and investment firm that invested in Internet startups, including Ask Jeeves, Tellme Networks, and of course, Zappos.com. Prior to Venture Frogs, Tony co-founded LinkExchange, an advertising network that was successfully sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998.
	Tim O’Reilly Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim’s long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
	Robert Scoble Robert Scoble is a leading blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is currently working for Rackspace where he is building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43. Scoble is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

Great partners make great conferences

We’re really lucky to have the corporate support of some of the best names in the business. Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Perkins Coie all returned quickly to support us for the third year in a row. Google, Founders Fund, Microsoft and MySpace are back for their second year of partnership. Additional partners will be named in the next few weeks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

But a few more days passed as people started telling me they were noticing the same thing. It would go in and out at certain times, but for the most part, AT&T’s network actually seemed to be working in the area. Were we all going crazy? No, says AT&T, who I contacted today to see what was going on that my service was actually working. “Improvements are underway,” is what I was told by a representative of the company after he asked around.

“Most of this is 850 MHz spectrum being added.” That is inline with recent reports about upgrades for AT&T GSM network. But those upgrades were scheduled to start in Atlanta first. As I said, I’m in San Francisco. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up (most of all mine), but it looks like AT&T may actually be taking the steps necessary to get its network working in the areas where service is particularly bad.

I’m told that this upgrade process (at least in San Francisco) will be continuing over the coming weeks. When that’s complete, AT&T is offering to give us a walk through of the big changes they’re making to improve the network that we rip at just about every chance we get (which I think is fair, given what we pay for the service). I’m cautiously optimistic on this. Has anyone else been noticing better service on their iPhones or any other AT&T device? Let us know in the comments.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs in the wings, but a lot of the companies queuing up look more like OpenTable.

The reservation Web site deserves props for making it out in a tricky time— the weekend it was picking its bankers one declared bankruptcy and another sold itself to a competitor. And yes, the price has impressively stayed above the $20 opening. But take a closer look at the deal: Only three million shares were floated to the public. No wonder the price has held– hardly anyone is in the stock. With a whopping 18 million still owned by insiders and investors, OpenTable looks more like a private company that just did another round of funding than a public company.

Given that insiders of other private companies are increasingly cashing out shares in later private funding rounds, is there practically a lot of difference returns-wise between a heady Series E or a small IPO with such a tiny float?

OpenTable’s real test will be what happens once insiders start selling to get liquidity.  CEO Jeff Jordan addressed that in his first post-quiet period interview, shot last week for my Yahoo show, TechTicker. (Clip below, around the seven minute mark.)

Jordan also notes at the two minute mark in this clip that since OpenTable priced, he’s been getting a flood of calls from Valley CEOs who are thinking about filing, so expect the mini-registration boom to continue. Actual returns for the beleaguered asset class, however, will be a different story.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernova’s Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).

Andrew thinks that real time streams such as Twitter are overwhelming and not very helpful for normal people yet. He pulled out the old canard that real time media will never replace traditional media or trusted Websites. I countered that kind of misses the point. The stream—be it Twiter, Facebook, or what have you—is simply a vehicle for directing attention elsewhere via short links and commenting on what is happening now. Those short links usually take you back to regular Websites or news articles, or even documents from years ago which all of a sudden are relevant once again. In that way, even events that happened long ago can be brought into the real time stream. It is like pulling an experience from deep memory and reliving it.

The argument veered into the philosophical (Keen challenged me to explain the difference between consciousness and memory), but fortunately we didn’t get too far down that path before wiser minds stepped in. Before I knew it investor John Borthwick from betaworks and Kevin Marks (who just joined BT from Google) were on the line schooling both Keen and me.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested from LaunchBox), just wrapped up its second annual 12-week program. Modeled after Y Combinator, LaunchBox invests seed capital of around $20,000-$25,000 into teams, and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship and access to a small army of advisers.

Drawn from a pool of over 275 applicants, eight teams were selected to make up the class of 2009. (For the class of 2008, read last year’s post). Below is a brief description of each with notes written by LaunchBox founder John McKinley, as well screencasts of their products and links to their websites.

SEC Watch
URL: http://www.secwatch.com

SEC Watch deals with a big problem facing individuals interested in research and investing—a mountain of invaluable data exists in SEC filings, but those filings are really difficult to deal with as an information source.

• Most people are dealing with filings many hours after they are issued, letting those with real-time access have first mover advantage
• The sheer volume of filings each day is massive (in 2008 alone, there were over 1MM filings, totaling 15 million pages )
• The search experience offered online by finance sites and the government is very crude in functionality
• There is no easy way to collaborate with others on the analysis, and share comments/observations

Why does this all matter? Well, if you had looked at AIG’s filings, for instance, you could have found information about their sub-prime mortgage exposure almost a year before things blew up. It was just buried in a footnote.

SEC Watch brings state of the art search technology, combined with user annotation and sharing capabilities to the problem, and has crafted a compelling product that both retail and professional investors and analysts can use. It is easy to track companies and keywords (e.g., “subprime”,”litigation”, etc.), and get automated results in near real-time when filings are posted that match your criteria. You can then dive down to the relevant sections, and annotate a given filing for your own personal use, your team’s use, or to share with the public.

Bandsintown
URL: http://www.bandistown.com

Bandsintown addresses a big shift in the whole economics of the music business. Nowadays, 70% of a band’s income comes not from music sales, but from touring. That’s up from 20% only four years ago. Ticket sales have never been more important, but the marketplace for tickets has become incredibly fragmented. There are 70+ separate ticket marketplaces on the web. That makes for a bad experience for a fan, but also a bad experience for music sites trying to encourage ticket sales for all the different artists they feature.

Bandsintown has dealt with this problem by building interfaces to 62 different ticket marketplaces, and then exposing all ticketing information as a simple to use API that music sites can integrate. They have increased their traffic to over 500K monthly unique visitors in the five months since they launched their API, and have a global partner base (including Spotify, the Hype Machine, and PureVolume among others).

Bandsintown automatically plugs into music players such as iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn your artist preferences, and then lets you track your favorite artists (and related ones) and receive alerts when events of interest are coming to your area. They are also preparing to release a new iPhone app (it’s awaiting approval from Apple) that lets you see local concerts based on your musical tastes and geo-location— think of it as Urban Spoon for live music.

There is lots of other good stuff too, like live event twitter integration to allow you to easily track both yours and others’ concert experiences. If you love live music, you’ll love Bandsintown.

Social Collective
URL: http://www.thesocialcollective.com/

Social Collective addresses the huge market of conferences and corporate meetings. There are an incredible 1.2 million conferences and corporate meeting in the US each year. It is a huge industry—close to $11 billion is spent worldwide. The problem is that in these tough economic times, revenue for event producers is down, and the demands from attendees and sponsors is up, as they want more for their dollar.

Social Collective is a browser-based service targeted at event marketing and the enhancement of the event experience for both attendees and sponsors. They powered SXSW this year, as well as the Oracle Open World and other big events.

They bring innovation to a pretty under-served industry by allowing things like crowd-sourced agenda design, social graph importing for attendees to reach out to friends and associates attending the same event, marketing tools for pre and post event awareness building by conference organizers, and tools for vendor communications and networking with attendees.

The service has been great in helping both long-standing events re-invigorate themselves, as well as first-time events get their word out to the marketplace.  They have both web and mobile experiences covered, and do some really nice things like allowing you to build your own tailored agenda for an event, and then import it into your online calendar. (FYI, this custom-agenda function was very popular at SXSW, with over 60% penetration).

TapMetrics
URL: http://www.tapmetrics.com/

TapMetrics is a tool designed by a team of iPhone application developers that brings together sales data, user feedback, software metrics, and other information into a consolidated dashboard to allow developers to manage a portfolio of applications quickly and easily.

The whole experience starts with a dashboard that lets you view important information about how your application portfolio is performing, and then lets you drill into each application to investigate any issue that is highlighted. The nice part of the TapMetrics solution is that while it does a great job on the business metrics of running an iPhone application, it does just as good of a job serving the needs of the engineer. Everything from detailed environmental data (which iPhone/Touch hardware is being used, which OS level, which release level of the application), to detailed crash reporting, to application messaging/event logs, and session tracking are supported within the integrated TapMetrics experience. That integration of both business and technical data (including session-level tracking) in a single dashboard is something no one else does today.

They also have a free iPhone app called TapMini that you can use to track sales data for your applications. If you are trying to get more out of your iPhone application portfolio (both in terms of improving the consumer experience and making more revenue), this can be an essential tool.

Unblab
URL: http://www.unblab.com/

Unblab is trying to attack the email overload problem by answering the question “What emails should I be reading”? They are approaching this by building a cloud-based service that uses common and user-specific rules to identify and prioritize important email messages. Think of it as attacking the email overload problem from the opposite end of the spectrum as the anti-spam vendors, but using similar technologies.

The latest productivity studies have white-collar workers now spending 4 hours a day in email-related activities, and the volume of legitimate inbox messages increasing 10% per year. The challenge is how to approach better management of that legitimate traffic.

Unblab has two products it is deploying initially to help refine its algorithms and demonstrate the value of its ranking system, which it calls “Importance ranking.”. One product is a Gmail add-on called GTriage, and the other is a mobile app called iTriage. The goal is to get early-stage learnings on the differences of what’s “important” when you are on a mobile device with limited real estate as compared to when you are using a pc-based webmail experience.

The API for the service will be opened up to developers to define their own user experiences (and to allow additional training events/algorithmic enhancements).

KeepFu
URL: http://www.keepfu.com/

KeepFu is a simple note-taking and organization tool to help manage consumer-defined “projects” like trip planning, event planning, and important purchases. The team has built a good Evernote-like note taking tool called Ubernote, and while they got some decent initial traction, they realized there were some key unmet needs that the whole web note-taking space was failing to serve.

Feedback from their own user based shaped this next-generation offering. This new product, KeepFu, is addressing the organization of information, not just the collection of it. KeepFu collects data through one-click and passive data collection while a user reads an email, visits a website, IMs with a friend, or send a Tweet. It then supports a quick drag and drop experience to organize these information snippets into community-created project templates (predefined file folders specific to an activity, like planning a trip). These projects are then easily published or shared.

The goal is to allow information capture without forcing a user to change context and leave the experience they are engaged in, and then support automated and manual classification and organization of the information when it is appropriate, a bit like the weekly photo tagging activity of Facebook users.  Simple collection, organization, and sharing is what KeepFu is all about.

Keen Guides
URL: http://www.keenguides.org/

Keen Guides started from the personal experience of its founder, a hearing-impaired woman who was visiting a very popular museum in Washington, DC and wanted to have her own tour experience. They handed her a dog-eared pile of paper, and sent her on her way. Trying to come up with a better experience, she went home and made a sign language version of the commentary as video clips she then viewed the next day on her iPod as she toured the Gallery. It was a transformative experience for her, and that’s when Keen Guides was born.

The goals of the company are simple:  Leverage new platforms (especially the iPhone) to replace outdated audio wands as content delivery tools.  Create self-paced custom tours, based on prior visitor feedback, what time you have available, and your unique interests. Encourage social interaction and sharing of comments, photos, etc., by tour participants.  Support access by all, including hearing and vision impaired visitors, as well as non-English speakers.

They are using the iPhone as their initial tour delivery platform, and will support tour content creation (and monetization) by both themselves as well as third parties like DC By Foot. Initial deployments include museums, city walking tours, and college campuses (for orientation tours.).

Legal River
URL: http://www.legalriver.com/

Legal River is focused on providing a marketplace for matching small businesses with legal professionals. Looking at search queries, you see a lot of businesses searching for uniquely skilled legal professional in areas like patent law, contract disputes, and other specialties.

While there are numerous directory sites for lawyers, they don’t encourage the concept of competing for a given business’s project, and do little to give prior client feedback and other useful data that would help a business owner to make an informed decision.

Legal River has created a marketplace where a business can anonymously post a given project and get competitive bids from multiple subject-matter experts. The system allows easy side-by-side comparison of credentials, prices, and prior client feedback on similar projects. The net result is a better, more transparent process that serves both the business owner as well as the legal professional, who gets access to high-quality local leads.

Legal River has signed distribution deals with a number of sites to both get their service offering in front of small business owners, as well as qualified local lawyers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The following message is brought to you by TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis.

In order to build excitement for the TechCrunch50 conference we’ve convinced the bean counters at TechCrunch HQ to let us give away one $2,500 ticket a day for the next 45 days. That’s more than $100,000 worth of TechCrunch50 tickets.

So, if you’re broke, laid off or too cheap to buy a ticket, all you have to do is hit your followers with the hashtag #techcrunch50 at the end of each tweet. Every Tweet you send out is another chance to win the ticket being given away that day.

Every day we will pick one of the tweets from the previous day with the #techcrunch50 hashtag at random.

Some rules:

1. Tweets should be relevant to startups, entrepreneurism or the the conference itself.
2. If you do something insane like create 20 accounts and spam twitter with 1,000 tweets a second we’ll bounce you from the drawing (and they will turn off your account!).
3. You can only win one ticket.
4. We will announce the previous day’s winner each day at noon pacific or thereabouts on the @techcrunch50 twitter account.

Good luck and we appreciate your support in this attempt to leverage social media to promote the conference.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

“Archive video has clearly exploded all over the internet, but live video hasn’t. We think it’s because more flexibility is needed that no single product can meet, but an open platform can.”

The API, which has been in closed testing for about a month now, will now be available to anyone who wishes to use it, for free. Justin.tv can do this because they’ve made live video cheap to serve. Their internal network has capacity for some 100 million hours of video viewing per month, we’re told. For some perspective, that’s roughly 2.5% of media giant Comcast’s capacity, but Justin.tv is run at a fraction of the cost.

And it’s not like it’s totally free with no strings attached. The initial launch of the API will be supported by ads. And eventually, a payment platform will be built-in to the API as well for developers who wish to service live video ad-free. In those cases, there would be revenue sharing with Justin.tv, we’re told. Still, the ad-supported free model makes it very compelling next to Stickam’s StreamAPI and Ustream’s offerings, both of which charge per view hour.

But costs aside, the key here is the access to the live video. Justin.tv is just one company and needs to maintain its core product, which means side projects like Camtweet, which was unveiled at our Real-time Stream event earlier this month and was built using this new API, aren’t going to pop up everyday. But with developers given access to the same tools, now Justin.tv doesn’t need to worry about doing all the work, it can have the community help is making cool new live video applications.

And just to give developers so ideas of what they can do with this API, Justin.tv internally made a few simple live video apps besides Camtweet. They are:

• A group chat application that allows an arbitrary number of broadcasts to be displayed on a single page as people join
• A Mac OSX dashboard widget that plays live video, allows search and includes a chat room–you can download this here, but please don’t share the URL http://soda.berkeley.edu/~kfb/jtv_dashboard.zip
• An automated event widget that can be embedded anywhere–once you setup an event the widget shows a countdown timer, automatically switches to a live video broadcast and then creates and displays a highlight clip after the event ends
• A baby monitor that alerts you when something happens in the broadcast–you can try this one out here http://www.slumbervision.com/

You can get access to these, dig into them, and get documentation on Justin.tv’s API wiki found here. You can also find the source code for Camtweet, which has been open-sourced, on Github here.

I suspect we may see the other live video services follow suit with free, ad-supported APIs. We watched them all rush to serve live video on Facebook’s platform last month, but opening it up to any app developer on the web for free is potentially much more interesting.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

But in a scene straight from The Office, the company’s commercial manager stood up and dismissively told the assembled media luminaries that they were “all sheep [who] should stop following the big media herd and advertise with Shiny… the new wave of blogs”.  “Bah!” said the sheep from major media agency Carat, and promptly walked out in disgust. Since then Shiny Media has been, many times over, lauded as the UK’s great new hope of blog publishing. But the shiny exterior of the operation appears to have been quite different to the reality.

Founded in 2004 by journalists Ashley Norris, Chris Price and Katie Lee, Shiny followed the Gawker/Weblogs Inc “blog network” model so fashionable at the time. The company was best known for its Shiny Shiny (girly gadgets), Tech Digest (technology) and Shoewawa (footwear) blogs. It had also expanded into other vertical titles, but attempts to break into the US market had been limited. Many have remarked that despite their efforts, Shiny Blogs had few stand-out publishing brands, that the blog designs had lurched from middling to worse, and that despite a few bright spots the company rarely attracted sufficient raw writing talent. Their passion for .tv domains also didn’t help.

Around the same time other UK entrepreneurs were trying their hands with blog networks like Mink Media and MessyMedia but none lasted – most citing the inability to scale to large traffic numbers in the UK. Shiny apparently thought they could buck the trend.

Sure enough, in January 2007 Shiny won its “$4.5 million” from Brightstation – headed by long-time UK entrepreneur Dan Wagner – for a 50pc stake. Or at least that’s what was said by the company at the time and consistently since. It appeared to be doing well; according to sources close to Brightstation, by November 2007 traffic to Shiny media was 3.5 millions uniques and revenues were in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum.

And yet, fast forward to 2009 and Shiny was limping. The company laid off half of its 17 staff in February, citing a tech advertising downturn. Norris, the original CEO, had departed in August 2008 to start experimenting in online video publishing and had become CEO of online men’s publisher Anorak Media. Katie Lee left in February 2009, at the same time as Shiny’s period of layoffs and cutbacks.

Recently, Anorak, under Norris, acquired a blog he founded, WhoAteAllThePies from Shiny, which then mothballed the title. Norris resumed blogging with Shiny.

Then on July 21, TechCrunch Europe folllowed up on a story broken by a former employee, that Shiny Media had gone into administration. Unknown to us at the time – but subsequently leaked – the day before, co-founder and director Chris Price had sent this email to all employees and freelancers.

From: Chris Price
Date: Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:33 PM
Subject: Shiny Media

Hi Guys,

I am very sorry for the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately
Shiny Media has been unable to continue trading because of mounting
debts in the business and a decision was taken at a board meeting on
Friday afternoon to put the company into administration.

Although the business received a cash injection of 80K through the
sale of Bag Lady and Shoewawa, the bank was unwilling to renew the
existing overdraft without imposing much more punitive terms on Ashley
and myself (including higher interest rates and our houses as
collateral) and general trading continued to be difficult.

At the same time as the company went into administration on Friday the
assets of Shiny Media were sold to a new company, comprising the
majority shareholders of Brightstation Ventures and the founders of
Shiny Media.

Unfortunately one of the former directors of Shiny Media who is a
small stakeholder in the business has taken it upon himself to indulge
in criminal activity including breaking and entering into the
premises, changing the locks without the landlord’s authority,
accessing emails and other passwords, deleting email accounts
(including mine), deleting users from the Movable Type network, moving
over Domain Names into his own name and switching off business mobile
phone numbers.

Not only is this damaging any future for the business, it also reduces
any amount of money left for Shiny Media’s creditors – including
freelance journalists, some of whom are yet to be paid. I also
understand he has been intimidating staff.

He has now received a letter from our lawyers in which we have asked
him to stop his disruptive and illegal behaviour and allow us access
to the building for which we have a licence to occupy. I am hoping he
will come to his senses tomorrow before we are forced to contact the
police, but unfortunately we have seen this irrational behaviour
before with other businesses he has been involved with.

Once again please accept my apologies – I was hoping to get in touch
with everyone at 12pm today. I will now update you all with more
details tomorrow.

Cheers, Chris

What publicly emerged, uncovered by TechCrunch Europe and sites like PaidContent UK, was that Shiny had indeed gone into administration the previous Friday, allegedly due to growing debts. Shortly afterward, the assets – including all websites with the exception of Bag Lady and Shoewawa – were bought by a new company, Shiny Digital. According to the Companies House registry in the UK, the equal shareholders in this new company were Shiny Trends (incorporated by Shiny co-founders Chris Price, Ashley Norris and Katie Lee last year) and Cansas Digital Ventures (a new registered name for Shiny Media’s venture funder Brightstation since August 2007).

Clearly there was something going on. Why had Price’s email and mobile been “switched off by one of the minority shareholders in the business”? Was there a disagreement going on at board level about the new structure? At any rate, an administrator had been brought in and many Shiny blogs had stopped updating.

That same day co-founder Katie Lee (who had left Shiny in February but remained a shareholder) confirmed the story on Twitter, saying in a tweet that “Looks like everyone knows Shiny Media has gone into administration. Still not entirely sure what’s going on tbh. Sorry for all writers.”

Lee also Twittered: “Just to clarify, because it’s always bugged me, Bright Station did not put $4.5m into Shiny Media.” She went on: “It was incorrectly reported in the press and we were told to stick with the story. Was mortified.”

Of course, this itself wasn’t quite correct. The press had simply reported what Shiny had told them. For years. And what it was still saying on their corporate blog, i.e. “How to spend $4.5 million.” It also appears that Brightstation itself never attempted to correct the record. Bright Station’s founders were interviewed in The Times in January 2007, again mentioning the $4.5 million figure.

A day later on July 22, co-founder Chris Price gave a more accurate picture of the company’s investment to The Guardian, saying Shiny had received “under a million pounds”. Sources close to the deal have confirmed this to us.

Lee continued to Tweet on the matter. She said the status of Shiny was up in the air and that “[I] Don’t know who administrators were. All presented as fait accompli”.

She also said “As far as I know, Shiny Media has already been bought [before I even knew it had gone into administration]. So hopefully some jobs OK.”

This suggested that the company had been put into administration and then bought almost immediately in what is normally referred to as a Pre-packaged sale. In a nutshell, this means that a buyer is lined-up – often the company is selling to another company where the directors are similar, if not the same – and a sale is made almost immediately after administration. However, a legal requirement is that the company for sale is advertised somewhere (and we’re not talking in some disused basement here, we’re talking somewhere public and online).

So was Shiny Media advertised for sale? If it was we can’t find any evidence of this to date.

Moving on…

On July 22, The Daily Telegraph followed up. Dan Wagner, CEO of Brightstation told the newspaper he was disputing the administration order for Shiny Media, the UK blog publishing house. He said the company was performing well and the administration was not necessary.

He said: “Shaa Wasmund and I, as directors of Shiny Media Limited and representing over 50pc of the shareholding in the company, are currently contesting the appointment of the administrator and the alleged subsequent sale of the assets. We are firmly of the view that Shiny Media was a solvent company on Friday July 17, in good shape and trading well.”

However, the company appointed to the administration told a different story. Wilson Field in Sheffield said Shiny Media had been left with no option but administration and said “Legal advice shows the appointment is valid.” A spokesperson said “We are satisfied that the company was insolvent as defined by Section 123 of the Insolvency Act 1986, as it was unable to pay its debts as and when they fell due. HM Revenue and Customs had threatened… proceedings. The administrators are currently considering taking legal remedies against Dan Wagner.” Shiny Media refused to comment at that time.

That day Price posted an early comment on PaidContent UK, reasserting his view that the company had gone into administration, saying “Every effort was made to continue trading, including selling of assets, redundancies, downsizing offices and, in the case of the directors, substantial pay cuts.”

The Guardian newspaper also reported that Price had emailed them, saying, again, that most of the assets of Shiny Media had been bought by a new venture, Shiny Digital. Again, this had shareholders including Norris and Lee, and Cansas Digital Ventures, the new vehicle for Brightstation.

In other words, it seems that Dan Wagner is contesting the fact that Shiny Media is not in administration, when a company he owns, Cansas Digital Ventures, is now part owner of all the old Shiny Media assets. Curiouser and curiouser.

The next day, July 23, Paidcontent reported that Ashley Norris had telephoned them to say “I’m completely heartbroken with the way it’s turned out. I’m disappointed we’re having to maintain radio silence and not comment – but it’s for legal reasons – we hope to be much more candid in the next few days.”

That day also, Katie Lee came out fighting. In a very long blog post (almost as long as this one) on The Daily Telegraph she said a number of things, including that the sale of the Shiny Media company’s assets to Shiny Digital had left her with less equity and some other early writers with none.

However, the most interesting part was this: “The pre-pack has certainly left a bad taste in my mouth and having any shares at all is making me uncomfortable.”

In other words she confirmed that this was a pre-packaged sale. Again, was it advertised in accordance with UK law?  A UK government report has found that in 35% of pre-packed sales, the administrators breached the rules.

In addition, further information has been passed to us about what happened at Shiny.

TechCrunch has been told by inside sources that Price and Norris “voted another person onto the board” in order to pass through a motion of insolvency. This prompted the “shareholder”, referred to in Price’s email to employees, to start locking down the company offices. This shareholder is believed to be Brightstation.

In fact, our sources say staff turned up on Monday and were confronted by some angry representatives from Brightstation. We also understand one freelancer was given the phone number of Brightstation by someone at Shiny, only to be told by Brightstation that it would be bringing to bear “all the legal might they could muster”.

We’ve also been told that Brightstation told in-house Shiny staff to go to the offices, and take whatever make-up (they had blogs about fashion and beauty), gadgets and fashion samples they could get their hands on. Comedic scenes apparently ensued when Price and Norris appeared and police were called thinking there was some kind of break-in going on.

The questions that arise from this affair are innumerable.

Why does Dan Wagner of Brightstation call this an “alleged sale” if Brightstation already owns part of the company that the assets were sold to. Wagner has declined to comment further.

Was Brightstation given the option to buy the assets or to invest further money by Shiny Media prior to is pre-pack sale to Shiny Digital?

How much were the assets sold for?

What attempts were made by the administrators to find another buyer for the assets? Was there any advertising? We’ve called the administrators but they have not returned our calls.

Some freelance Shiny writers say they were still waiting for payments owed prior to Shiny entering administration. Some are owed at least £4,000. This could substantiate the administrator’s view that Shiny Media “was unable to pay its debts”.

Who is this mystery additional shareholder that voted for administration?

Was Brightstation aware of the whole process?

We’ve spoken to Ashley Norris. He told us “We can’t speak because of various ongoing legal situations.” But he did say the administrators had been happy with the process to date and will be issuing a press release in due course.

We have another, well placed source that suggests a further twist. They tell us that Brightstation themselves didn’t put the money into Shiny Media, but in fact acted as a middleman between Shiny and another company (as yet unnamed) which provided the money to power Brightstation. That company made most of its money from sub-prime mortgages so when the market tanked last year, so did their financial muscle. As a result they weren’t able to give Shiny Media all the money they were promised, which may have further exacerbated the company’s woes.

The source suggests that it was these financial problems which caused a breakdown in relations and communication between all parties, leading to the chaos we’ve witnessed this week.

Finally, it is worth recalling who Dan Wagner is. This is a tough entrepreneur and investor who is best known for running the Maid online information business in the 1990s, and turning down an opportunity to invest $1m (£510,000) for 30% of the fledgling Ebay — a stake that would now be worth many billions. He also bought the assets of Boo.com for a reported $375,000 back during the dotcom crash and turned it into the successful ecommerce player Venda. And his Wikipedia page suggests that he is not one to take things lying down.

Perhaps it would be generous however to end on a lighter note. The shiny, flock wallpaper in Shiny’s Central London office (which they shared with fellow-Brightstation-backed OSOYOU) cost £80 a sheet. Isn’t it shiny?

Picture of Shiny founders: The Guardian

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yahoo just released earnings for the second quarter. Total revenues dropped 13 percent to $1.5 billion. Google, in contrast, saw total revenues rise 3 percent in same quarter. After paying partner sites traffic acquisition costs (TAC), Yahoo’s take-home revenue was $1.1 billion.

Yahoo’s net income rose 8 percent to $141 million. Operating income fell 17 percent to $101 million, and net income fell a whopping 78 percent to $118 million (but much of that difference was due to a $401 million non-cash gain Yahoo took in the first quarter related to its stake in Alibaba, which had an IPO).

Yahoo’s search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites declined 15 percent to $359 million, while display advertising on owned and operated sites declined 14 percent to $393 million. Yahoo announced a deal with AT&T to sell local online ads.

Correction: This post briefly included information about layoffs which was incorrect. My apologies for alarming any Yahoo employees.

During the conference call, CEO Carol Bartz praised Bing (Microsoft’s search effort) and promised to get rid of annoying ads on Yahoo Mail. My live notes are below (bolded parts are for emphasis):

Carol Bartz:

Considering the economy I am pleased with our results, revenues above midpoint of our expectations, upside coming from currency fluctuations.

Less fear from advertisers.

But so much conflicting info form the market, too early to call.

1. great team (hired CFO)
2. great experience (mobile, social, advertising) have to make sure ads are more relevant, less irritating to users.
3. Better business processes. Want to be a better company to work for and with.

CFO Tim Morse:

Pageviews up 7%
Rev: $1.573 billion (down 13%)
Search revenues down 15%
display revenues down 14%
encouraging sign: guaranteed display inventory increased on a sequential basis
growth in health and travel

Affiliate business (primarily search) down
TAC was 28% of total revenue, rising slightly

listings revenue down 21%

OCF (operating cash flow) $385M
free cash flow $266M

savings at the low end of our expectations due to cost savings. Planning on hiring new sales people, invest in branding efforts to seize growth opps that will come as economy recovers.

$365M restructuring charge, real estate related and $25M related to headcount reduction
$67M pretax gain from sale in Gmarket.

Carol Bartz:

Biggest content site. Lead in news, sports, finance, and other categories. Yahoo homepages leads all others.
brags about a single link from Yahoo home page to NYT, creating 9M pageviews.
“We work with publishers, not against them” (subtle dig at Google)

Yahoo mail, open features, improvements in speed and performance and engagement.
Talks about annoying ads, calls them a “detriment,” “cheapening the Yahoo brand.” Will be trying to get rid of blaring ads.

Initiative around improving ad experience

Talks about mobile search deal with cell phone carrier in Taiwan to displace Google [she's digging deep there]

expanded relationship with AT&T to sell Yahoo local inventory by AT&T advertising salesforce. Yahoo’s salesforce with its advertising partners is now 13K strong.

Q&A:

Q: Carol, what is your first impression on Bing? Seeing any user behavior changes?

Carol: I think Bing is actually a good product. Experimentation around search instead of thinking just a standard blue link. only a month in, hard to understand if it is just curiosity or if they will gain share, but I think they have done a nice job.

Q: Search business seems to have deteriorated, display shows sequential improvement. Where is the bets ROI, display or search, since you will prob. have to choose one or the other?

Carol: Search did decline Q over Q, that is not a meaningful trend. Our volume was healthy, more that there was RPS pressure. The whole idea is to keep to optimize and drive relevancy for advertiser’s ROI. Advertisers being smarter, chose less keywords.

At the end of the day, our investment priority is in the user. If we can increase our audience, which we know we can, we can drive both search and display revenues. We can provide both, but what we really need to provide ad partners is an engaged audience.

Tim: CPCs not that different, more a mix in the queries.

Q: Do you get renumerated for links to Facebook or Gmail?

Carol: No, it is really about giving consumers an experience on Yahoo without having to leave Yahoo. To be the center of their online life. Not about money, about helping them organize their online life.

Q: Ebitda margins lowest guidance since 2003. You said you would be ramping spending in Q, how should we think about margins?

Carol: When we gave the guidance last Q we told you we were going to to layoffs to have room to put the same cost into the system to reinvest into the business. Pretty much on target with that. Marketing spend for 3Q is in the additional cost already ($75M?). Adding people into product, engineering, sales people.

Tim: Repositioning cost structure, drained some buckets, now filling up different buckets.

Q: What percentage of ad inventory is guaranteed? How should we think about yearly cost structure?

Tim: We don’t break out between guaranteed and non-guaranteed. We did see strength in guaranteed in high-single digits. Strength in 7 out of 10 categories we track like finance, health, consumer products. In non-guaranteed ads, more steady.

Carol Bartz: It’s like 30 to 40 steps to buy a display ad from us. Want to have a much. much easier way to do business with us. Looking forward to making this better.

Q: How is growth in Q2 breaking down?

Carol Bartz: We don’t actually break this out, but there are those people experimenting more with non-guaranteed and new customers coming in with guaranteed. By moving more into the mid-market that will be a lot more non-guaranteed because that is their first online ad experience.

Tim: We are doing very well with our top advertisers. On Display, revs are up with top ten advertisers. Also in Search, but not quite as good.

Q: O and O search vs. affiliate revs?

Bartz: I don’t see a trend.

Q: U.S. was down, looks like RPS (revenue per search) pressure, is that because of scale vs. Google?

Bartz: Of course scale matters in search. I’d switch positions, that’d be fun. When you have fewer click-throughs and you have a longer tail you get to monetize more. But our search volume is holding fine. We have to convince those buyers to get off the chair and push buy.

Q: Follow up on RPS, you talked about improving relevancy of ads. Can you talk about levers you can pull to improve RPS, how do you view new homepage impact on search

Bartz: Alot of what we are talking about in improving ads is display. You know what an irritating ad is. With RPS, working to drive teh right ad to the right query, better targeting. With how Metro will impact search, we are pleased with search placement on the homepage. improved quality in display, improved relevance in search and make search more prominent will help drive relevancy.

You have to get users to say, I like those. then they tell their friends. You take some of the bad ads off mail, guess what, they stay. All of that is a better experience. All of that will drive advertisers to us.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The Twitter document leak fiasco started with a simple story that personal accounts of Twitter employees were hacked. Twitter CEO Evan Williams commented on that story, saying that Twitter itself was mostly unaffected. No personal accounts were compromised, and “most of the sensitive information was personal rather than company-related,” he said. The individual behind the attacks, known as Hacker Croll, wasn’t happy with that response. Lots of Twitter corporate information was compromised, and he wanted the world to know about it. So he sent us all of the documents that he obtained, some 310 of them, and the story developed from there.

This post isn’t about the confidential information taken from Twitter. It’s about exactly how Hacker Croll was able to get such deep access to Twitter in the first place.

It’s clear that Twitter was completely unaware of how deeply they were affected as a company – when Williams said that most of the information wasn’t company related he believed it. It wasn’t until later that he realized just how much and what kind of information was taken. It included things like financial projections and executive meeting notes that contained highly confidential information.

We’ve already said a lot about all of this and the related “server password = password” story that was discovered by another individual last week. But we’ve got two more stories to tell. The first, this post, is exactly how the hacks took place, based on information gathered from hours of conversations with Hacker Croll. The second is what was happening behind he scenes with Twitter as the story unfolded. We’ll post that later this week.

When the story first broke the true scope of what had taken place and how it occurred was not understood. Various bloggers speculated about the cause of the attack – with some placing the blame on Google while others blaming the rising trend of hosting documents in the cloud.

We immediately informed Twitter of the information we had in our possession (and forwarded it to them), and at the same time reached out to the attacker. With some convincing, the attacker responsible for the intrusion at Twitter began a dialog with us. I spent days communicating with the attacker in an effort to gain insight into how the attack took place, what the true scope of it was and how we could learn from it.

We’ve waited to post exactly what happened until Twitter had time to close all of these security holes.

Some Background

In the security industry there is a generally accepted philosophy that no system or network is completely secure – a competent attacker with enough time, patience and resources will eventually find a way into a target. Some of the more famous information security breaches have relied on nothing more than elementary issues exploited by an attacker with enough time and patience at hand to see their goal through. A classic example is the case of Gary McKinnon, a self-confessed “bumbling computer nerd” who while usually drunk and high on cannabis would spend days randomly dialing or attempting to login to government servers using default passwords. His efforts led to the compromise of almost 100 servers within a number of government departments. After McKinnon spent a number of years trawling through servers looking for evidence of alien life (long story), somebody within the government finally wised up to his activities which lead to not only the arrest and attempted extradition of McKinnon from the United Kingdom, but a massive re-evaluation of the security methods employed to protect government information.

A more recent example is the case of Kendall Myers, who after being recruited to work for the Cuban government by an anonymous stranger they met while on holiday in that country, set out to obtain a high ranking position within the State Department specifically to obtain access to US government secrets. Kendall dedicated his entire life to obtaining state secrets, and up until he was recently caught by the FBI had successfully passed on secret information and internal documents to the Cuban government for 30 years. He relied only on his memory, his education credentials and sheer dedication.

The Twitter Attack: How The Ecosystem Failed

Like other successful attacks, Hacker Croll used the same combination of patience, sheer determination and somewhat elementary methods to gain access to a frightening number of accounts and services related to Twitter and Twitter employees. The list of services affected either directly, or indirectly, are some of the most popular web applications and services in use today – Gmail, Google Apps, GoDaddy, MobileMe, AT&T, Amazon, Hotmail, Paypal and iTunes . Taken individually, most of these services have reasonable security precautions against intrusion. But there are huge weaknesses when they are looked at together, as an ecosystem. Like dominoes, once one fell (Gmail was the first to go), the others all tumbled as well. The end result was chaos, and raises important questions about how private corporate and personal information is managed and secured in a time when the trend is towards more data, applications and entire user identities being hosted on the web and ‘in the cloud’.

“Hacker Croll” is a Frenchman in his early 20’s. He currently resides in a European country and first discovered his interest in web security over two years ago. Currently in between jobs, he has made use of the additional time he now has, along with his acquired skillset, to break into both corporate and personal accounts across the web. His knowledge of web security has been attained through a combination of materials available to the public and from within a tight-knit group of fellow crackers who exchange details of new, and sometimes unknown, techniques and vulnerabilities. Despite the significance and impact a successful attack has, the cracker claims that his primary motivation is a combination of curiosity, exploration and an interest in web security. There is almost a voyeuristic tendency amongst these individuals, as they revel in the thought of gaining privileged access to information about the inner lives of individuals and corporations. The “high” of access and gaining unauthorized knowledge must be big enough to carry a cracker’s motivation through the long hours, days and months of effort it may take to hit the next pot of gold.

For Hacker Croll, his first port of call in setting out to gain access to a target network is to make use of public search engines and public information to build a profile of a company or individual. In the case of the Twitter attacks, this public information allowed him to create a rich catalog of data that included a list of employee names, their associated email addresses and their roles within the company. Information like birth dates, names of pets and other seemingly innocent pieces of data were also found and logged. This dragnet across the millions of pages on the web picked up both work and personal information on each of the names that were discovered. Public information on the web has no concept of, or ability to, distinguish between the work and personal details of a person’s identity – so from the perspective of a cracker on a research mission, having both the business and personal aspects of a target’s digital life intertwined only serves to provide additional potential entry points.

With his target mapped out, Hacker Croll knew that he likely only needed a single entry point in any one of the business or personal accounts in his list in order to penetrate the network and then spread into other accounts and other parts of the business. This is because the web was designed at a time where there was implicit trust between its participants – requiring no central or formal identification mechanism. In order to keep private data private, modern web applications have built out their own systems and policies that require a user to register and then manage their identities separately with each app. The identifier that most applications use is an email address, and it is this common factor that creates a de facto trust relationship between a user’s applications. The second factor is a password: a random string that only the user knows, is unique to each application, and in theory should take even a computer months or years to figure out if it started guessing. These two elements would work well enough for most cases, were it not for what is often the single weakest factor: human habit.

Look at the front page of almost any web application and you will see hints at just how hopeless and helpless we are in managing our digital lives: “forgot my password”, “forgot my username”, “keep me logged in”, “do not keep me logged in”, “forgot my name”, “who am i?”. Features that were designed and built as a compromise since we are often unable to remember and recall a single four-digit PIN number, let alone a unique password for every application we ever sign up for. Each new service that a user signs up for creates a management overhead that collapses quickly into a common dirty habit of using simple passwords, everywhere. At that point, the security of that user’s entire online identity is only as strong as the weakest application they use – which often is to say, very weak.

Now going back to Hacker Croll and his list of Twitter employees and other information. Twitter just happens to be one of a number of a new breed of companies where almost the entire business exists online. Each of these employees, as part of their work, share data with other employees – be it through a feature of a particular application or simply through email. As these users become interwoven, it adds a whole new attack vector whereby the weak point in the chain is no longer just the weakest application – it is the weakest application used by the weakest user. For an attacker such as Hacker Croll looking to exploit the combination of bad user habit, poorly implemented features and users mixing their personal and business data – his chances of success just got exponentially greater. Companies that are heavily web based rely largely on users being able to manage themselves – the odds are not only stacked against Twitter, they are stacked against most companies adopting this model.

Unfortunately for Twitter, Hacker Croll found such a weak point. An employee who has online habits that are probably no different than those of 98% of other web users. It began with the personal Gmail account of this employee. As with most other web applications, the personal edition of Gmail has a password recovery feature that presents a user with a number of challenges to prove their identity so that their password can be reset. It likely wasn’t the first account from a Twitter employee that Hacker Croll had attempted to access – but in the case of this particular account he discovered a kink in the armor that gave him the big first step. On requesting to recover the password, Gmail informed him that an email had been sent to the user’s secondary email account. In an effort to balance usability with security, Gmail offered a hint as to which account the email to reset the password was being sent to, in case the user required a gentle reminder. In this case the obfuscated pointer to the location of the secondary email account was ******@h******.com. The natural best guess was that the secondary email account was hosted at hotmail.com.

At Hotmail, Hacker Croll again attempted the password recovery procedure – making an educated guess of what the username would be based on what he already knew. This is the point where the chain of trust broke down, as the attacker discovered that the account specified as a secondary for Gmail, and hosted at Hotmail was no longer active. This is due to a policy at Hotmail where old and dormant accounts are removed and recycled. He registered the account, re-requested the password recovery feature at Gmail and within a few moments had access to the personal Gmail account of a Twitter employee. The first domino had fallen.

Well designed web applications will never just give a user their password if they forget it, they will force the user to pick a new one. Hacker Croll had access to the account, but with a password he had specified. To not alert the account owner that their account had been compromised, he had to somehow find out what the old Gmail password was and to set it back. He now had a bevy of information at his fingertips, a complete mailbox and control of an email account. It wasn’t long before he found an email that would have looked something like this:

To: Lazy User
From: Super Duper Web Service
Subject: Thank you for signing up to Super Duper Web Service

Dear Lazy User,

Thank you for signing up to Super Duper Web Service. For the benefit of our support department (and anybody else who is reading this), please find your account information below:

username: LazyUser
password: funsticks

To reset your password please follow the link to.. ahh forget it, nobody does this anyway.

Regards,

Super Duper Web Service

Bad human habit #1: Using the same passwords everywhere. We are all guilty of it. Search your own inbox for a password of your own. Hacker Croll reset the password of the Gmail account to the password he found associated with some random web service the user had subscribed to and that sent a confirmation with the password in clear text (and he found the same password more than once). He then waited, to check that the user was still able to access their account. Not too long later there was obvious activity in the email account from the account owner – incoming email read, replies sent and new messages drafted. The account owner never would have noticed that a complete stranger was lurking in the background. The second domino falls.

From here it was easy.

Hacker Croll now sifts through the new set of information he has access to – using the emails from this user’s personal Gmail account to further fill in his information map of his target. He extends his access out to all the other services he finds that this user has signed up for. In some instances, the password is again the same – that led Croll into this user’s work email account, hosted on Google Apps for Domains. It turns out that this employee (and in fact most/all Twitter employees and everyone else) used the same password for their Google Apps email (the Twitter email account) as he did with his personal Gmail account. With other sites, where the original password may not work – he takes advantage of a feature many sites have implemented to help users recover passwords: the notorious “secret question”.

Fork the story here for a moment because there is a real issue here with the “secret question” (from here on abbreviated more appropriately as just “secret ?”). For some strange reason, some sites refer to the “secret ?” as an additional layer of security – when it is often the complete opposite. In the story of Hacker Croll and Twitter, the internal documents that we now all know about were only a few steps away from the first account he gained access to. In addition to that, this attacker, and certainly others just like him, have been able to demonstrate that some of the biggest and most popular applications on the web contain fundamental weaknesses that alone might seem harmless, but in combination with other factors can cause an attacker to completely tear through the accounts of users, even those who maintain good password policy.

This is not the first time that the issue of “secret ?” being used in password recovery systems has been raised. Last September, US Republican Vice Presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, had screenshots of her personal Yahoo mail account published to Wikileaks. A hacker or group known only as ‘Anonymous’ claimed credit for the hack, which was carried out by the attacker making an educated guess in response to the security question used to recover passwords. In early 2005, celebrity Paris Hilton suffered a similar incident when her T-Mobile sidekick account was broken into, and the details of her call log, messages (some with private pictures of Hilton) and contact list were leaked to the media. The culprit, again, was “secret ?”.

Giving the user an option to guess the name of a pet in lieu of actually knowing a password is just dramatically shortening the odds for the attacker. The service is essentially telling the attacker: “we understand that guessing passwords is hard, so let us help you narrow it down from potentially millions of combinations to around a dozen, or even better, if you know how to Google, just one”. The problem is not the concept of having an additional authorization token, such as mothers maiden name, that can be used to authenticate in addition to a password, the problem arises when it is relied on alone, when the answer is stored in the clear in account settings, and when users end up using the same question and answer combination on all of their accounts.

From this point, with a single personal account as a starting point, the intrusion spread like a virus – infecting a number of accounts on a number of different services both inside and outside of Twitter. Once Hacker Croll had access to the employee’s Twitter email account hosted by Google, he was able to download attachments to email that included lots of sensitive information, including more passwords and usernames. He quickly took over the accounts of at least three senior execs, including Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Perusing their email attachments led to lots more sensitive data being downloaded.

He then spidered out and accessed AT&T for phone logs, Amazon for purchasing history, MobileMe for more personal emails and iTunes for full credit card information (iTunes has a security hole that shows credit card information in clear text – we’ve notified Apple but have not heard back, so we won’t publish the still-open exploit now).

Basically, when he was done, Hacker Croll had enough personal and work information on key Twitter executives to make their lives a living hell.

Just to summarize the attack:

1. HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.
2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.
3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.
5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.
6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

What could have happened next is that Hacker Croll could have used or sold this information for profit. He didn’t do that, and says he never intended to. All he wanted to do, he says, was to highlight the weaknesses in Twitter’s data security policies and get them and other startups to consider more robust security measures.

He also says he’s sorry for causing Twitter so much trouble. We asked Hacker Croll if he had any message he wants to deliver to Twitter, and he sent me the following:

Je tiens à présenter toutes mes excuses au personnel de Twitter. Je trouve que cette société a beaucoup d’avenir devant elle.

J’ai fait cela dans un but non lucratif. La sécurité est un domaine qui me passionne depuis de longues années et je voudrais en faire mon métier. Dans mon quotidien, il m’arrive d’aider des gens à se prémunir contre les dangers de l’internet. Je leur apprend les règles de base.. Par exemple : Faire attention où on clique, les fichiers que l’on télécharge et ce que l’on tape au clavier. S’assurer que l’ordinateur est équipé d’une protection efficace contre les virus, attaques extérieures, spam, phishing… Mettre à jour le système d’exploitation, les logiciels fréquemment utilisés… Penser à utiliser des mots de passe sans aucune similitude entre eux. Penser à les changer régulièrement… Ne jamais stocker d’informations confidentielles sur l’ordinateur…

J’espère que mes interventions répétées auront permis de montrer à quel point il peut être facile à une personne mal intentionnée d’accéder à des informations sensibles sans trop de connaissances.

Hacker Croll.

This roughly translates to:

I would like to offer my personal apology to Twitter. I think this company has a great future ahead of it.

I did not do this to profit from the information. Security is an area that fascinated me for many years and I want to do my job. In my everyday life, I help people to guard against the dangers of the Internet. I learned the basic rules .. For example: Be careful where you click the files that you download and what you type on the keyboard. Ensure that the computer is equipped with effective protection against viruses, external attacks, spam, phishing … Upgrading the operating system, software commonly used … Remember to use passwords without any similarity between them. Remember to change them regularly … Never store confidential information on the computer …

I hope that my intervention will be repeated to show how easy it can be for a malicious person to gain access to sensitive information without too much knowledge.

Croll hacker.

What’s the takeaway from all this? Cloud services are convenient and cheap, and can help a company grow more quickly. But security infrastructure is still nascent. And while any single service can be fairly secure, the important thing is that the ecosystem most certainly is not. Combine the fact that so much personal information about individuals is so easily findable on the web with the reality that most people have merged their work and personal identities and you’ve got the seed of a problem. A single Gmail account falls, and soon the security integrity of an entire startup crumbles. So for a start, reset those passwords and don’t use the same passwords for different services. Don’t use password recovery questions that can easily be answered with a simple web search (an easy solution is to answer those questions falsely). And just in general be paranoid about data security. You may be happy you were.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The event is aimed at showcasing ten promising Israeli startups and to serve as a networking platform for the individuals and companies leading Israel’s startup scene. All ten companies were chosen by a world-class panel of judges, ranging from über-Angel investor Ron Conway, to legendary ICQ founder and current founder and CTO of Dotomi, Yair Goldfinger.

Below are the official company descriptions for the ten startups chosen by the judges to present their products on stage in front of over 700 private and institutional investors, executives and entrepreneurs:

Shidonni is a web based virtual world for young kids, based on the simple joy of drawing. In Shidonni, kids draw their virtual pets and play with them as they magically ‘come alive’. After creating their pets, children enjoy over 30 different activities and games featuring their own creations and can even share their creation with their friends.

Confidela provides businesses and individuals with hassle-free document control, tracking and protection services to facilitate the sharing of sensitive documents with customers, partners or suppliers. Confidela’s flagship SaaS product, WatchDox, is the easiest way for organizations to send documents securely, and control and track who views, edits, prints or forwards them.

Cmycasa is a first of its kind “Handshake service” between home owners and furniture retailers. With Cmycasa, users of real estate web sites and “do-it-yourself portals” will be able to visualize in stunning photo-realistic 3D how their new home will look once furnished to their taste.

Cellerium is the maker of MobileCanvas, a mobile application platform that delivers rich, mobile tailored web experiences across leading mobile platforms. Cellerium AppOnce approach resolves device and operating system fragmentation and combines a rich UI experience that rivals client centered applications with the flexibility of web deployment.

ContextIn is a semantic media-buying platform for display-advertising. Using semantic algorithms for automatic extraction of the discussed topics in web pages, ContextIn addresses the display advertising market problems of absence of visibility and control over the media-buying and poor performance, especially over user-generated-content sites. ContextIn offers a new and innovative solution, which proved to show significant increase in the online campaigns returns, using automatic ads targeting, real-time bidding, unique BI data and dynamic ad-creative creation according to the web-site content.

Tweegee is a pioneering destination site designed exclusively for kids. The site empowers children and pre-teens, ages 7 to 12, to express themselves creatively and safely in an innovative and customized online environment. Tweegee integrates social networking, digital content, and interactive tools to offer a complete web platform for kids. Tweegee’s platform has been released with great success in Russia and soon in Turkey and many other countries. (Tweegee debuted at TechCrunch50 2008).

KIDO’Z is a web operating environment intended for children between the ages of 3-8yrs. KIDO’Z creates a personal protected Internet space with a collection of special tools that enable the children, for the first time, to carry out everything that adults do on the Internet; but simply and intuitively, and without needing to know how to read or write.

CamSpace is a ground breaking computer vision platform that connects the virtual and the real world through motion games, experiences, activities and navigation of application and websites through your browser and using any standard webcam. The platform can detect human gestures and turns everyday products (like cans, bottles, boxes, etc) or objects into exciting computer controllers that can operate new or existing games and applications. The company is active in the advertising space (creating games and experiences based on products), in the educational space and in the social/fun gaming space. (Disclosure: I advised the company in the past).

Virtual Web provides innovative social network marketing solutions. Its SociaLAVA™ platform enables online publishers of any scale to instantly deploy a fully-functional social network as a transparent layer over their existing websites, powered by a unique social network interaction analysis engine™. Publishers can offer users personalized content to keep them on the site for longer visits, enhance conversion rates, monetize their sites through segmented ads, increase site ‘stickiness’ and link a consistently growing number of online communities to their domains using a unique community-clustering mechanism.

Reimage is a fast growing company that offers a web-based service that automates all PC repairs (due to software problems), and makes PC’s run better than new using unique boosting technologies. To date, Reimage has repaired tens of thousands of Windows based computers.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.