Archive for June 2nd, 2009
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 10:41 pm
About 45 minutes ago I tried logging into Mahalo to stake a few claims for myself in the site’s revamped directory, which pays users for creating and maintaining their entries. This has proven far more difficult than it should be. In fact, it seems like Mahalo’s account system is totally broken.
First, I attempted to create a new user name for myself. I decided to go with MrCody, which is the name of my dog. Things seemed normal at first, until I noticed that my username at the top of the screen was now ‘mahendranunna’. A refresh later and Mahalo said “Welcome cddesai”. Being the inquisitive reporter that I am, I attempted to navigate through the user’s control panel. I could view the pages that they were currently managing. I tried to ask a question on Mahalo Answers under one of these accounts, and it seemed to work (the site is currently down so I can’t check to see if it actually posted). Over the course of the next twenty minutes, I was logged in as at least 8 different users. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing to jump between identities — sometimes a refresh would do it, other times I’d have the same username for a few minutes. It was bizarre.
We got in touch with CEO Jason Calacanis, who says that the problem is a “caching issue”, and that “the users aren’t actually logged in as another users (just appears that way).” Fine. But the site is still going down sporadically, and I still haven’t gotten the damn Email to activate the account I signed up for in the first place.
Disclosure: Jason Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference.
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Mahalo’s Case Of Mistaken Identity
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 7:48 pm
With the launch of Mahalo 2.0, out this evening, the Santa Monica-based Mahalo.com Inc. will attempt to harness the online micro-labor market to help it build lots more pages for its “human-powered” search engine.
(As of this writing, the site was still a little fritzy.)
The new interface includes an intuitive “page editor” designed to make creating new entries a semi-automated cakewalk. Instead of fussing with arcane Wiki-type coding, anyone who wants to can choose an unclaimed topic — say, “kraut dogs” — and the system will present a list of online resources — videos, news stories, blog posts, images — that can be click-selected for inclusion on the new reference page. Users can then fill in a few details with their good old-fashioned writing skills.
Unlike the non-profit Wikipedia, which relies on an army of volunteers to stay current, Mahalo will compensate its worker bees by sharing the advertising revenue from each page with the user who builds and maintains it.
Is becoming a full-time Mahalo editor going to get you rich quick? Like anything else, that’ll depend on how hard you want to work and how lucky you get.
Google’s semi-forgotten Knol encyclopedia also promises contributors a share of the revenue on pages they build. But stories of the Ferrari that Knol bought or the house that Knol built are still in short supply nearly a year after the product’s launch.
Still, unlike the Google juggernaut for which Knol is but a petri dish, Mahalo is betting its future on the new system. The
company used to pay a small stable of contractors $10 an hour to laboriously hand-code
and monitor its pages. But now that its page base has reached more than
100,000, the site is becoming too big to maintain with a limited staff. So it’s
opening the doors to everyone with extra time and a yen for dollars.
According to Mahalo, only about a third of its pages earn over $10 a year in revenue — but some can make drastically more. (This page on the 2009 stimulus package pulls in about $3,000 a month, the company says.)
Say you create and manage 500 pages in a year: That’s $5,000 — if you generously assume that all your pages are in the top 33% traffic-wise, and that none of them makes much more than $10.
But the company is hoping to promote a “gold rush mentality,” in which users enterprising and lucky enough to stake out high-traffic topics will be rewarded with big money. And, the theory goes, the more pages its new labor force builds, the more traffic the site will attract; and the more traffic it attracts, the more advertising revenue there will be to split with users — eureka!
In an interview, Mahalo Chief Executive Jason Calacanis said he hoped that the new system would be a “tipping point” for the 2-year-old company.
“We really want to get to the teens or 25 million uniques — that’s when the service becomes what I would say is very, very profitable,” Calacanis explained.
The key to the new system, he believes, is the fast and simple way it will enable users to create new pages. With the need for coding gone, the process becomes a series of quick decisions about which bits of online content they want to include. (Plus a little of the aforementioned “writing.”)
“Basically, we’re putting humans on top of the search process that machines are doing,” Calacanis said.
“This is all coming from APIs from other search engines,” he added, referring to the content that the page editor pulls from around the Web and presents to page creators. “It’s sort of like, here’s your color palette, now paint something.”
– David Sarno
Read more:
Mahalo 2.0: search engine will share revenue with users who help it grow
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 7:12 pm
Having flirted with branded entertainment last year, NBC Universal is preparing a full lineup of original online videos that blur the line between content and advertising. It announced the first of these productions today: a series of webisodes called “CTRL,” based on the 2007 short film “CTRL Z.” The series, like the original film, was written and directed by Rob Kirbyson. But the plot has been augmented to give a featured role to Nestea, the Coca-Cola Co. brand that sponsored the production.
The idea behind branded entertainment is to replace interruptive commercials with an integrated message promoting the sponsor’s product(s). Cameron Death, vice president of digital content for NBC Universal, said the company tried that approach for the first time with last year’s “Gemini Division,” a sci-fi whodunit starring Rosario Dawson. Five different brands were featured in the course of the series’ 65 short episodes. To find sponsors for this year’s programming, Death said in an interview, the company took a slate of programs in development to advertisers in January, then worked with the programs’ creators to integrate the brands into the videos.
“CTRL 7″ was the story of a beleaguered office worker named Stuart who discovered that he could control the action around him through commands on his computer keyboard. Think of how you might use keyboard shortcuts in a document or photo editing program; that gives you an idea of how Stuart edited reality. For the 10 new episodes, Kirbyson kept the same story line, with one twist: Stuart unlocks the powers of his keyboard by accidentally spilling a can of Nestea Red onto it. The point is to subtly convey that Nestea is “Liquid Awesomeness,” as its trademarked tagline goes.
Death said Kirbyson was given “complete free rein” to tell the story as he wished, with the provison that he find a way to work Nestea into it. The sponsor consulted with NBC Universal on how its brand would be portrayed, Death said, “but it’s still a writer’s product.” That’s the company’s general approach to branded entertainment: although the program creators are briefed about the brand and the attributes the sponsor wants to promote, “we still want them to do what they do, which is tell great stories.” He added that “CTRL” is a good example of what branded entertainment isn’t: “It isn’t Stuart looking straight into the camera and talking about how great Nestea Red is.”
To some media watchdogs, that’s precisely the problem. They complain that the practice isn’t transparent enough, and should be more clearly labeled as advertising. Not surprisingly, Death disagreed. “I think viewers are infinitely more intelligent than we sometimes give them credit for,” he said. For Coca-Cola to reap the full benefits of its sponsorship, “CTRL” fans need to know that Nestea is bringing it to them — and viewers are smart enough to understand that. “It’s a really interesting balance,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything less honest about it.”
NBC Universal plans to distribute “CTRL” this summer through a variety of channels, including Hulu.com, cable video-on-demand services and a dedicated website. Death was coy about the rest of this year’s digital line-up, saying only, “We have a lot in the pipeline.”
Credit: Image of the short film “CTRL Z” courtesy of the film’s website.
– Jon Healey
Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division.
[via LATimes.com]
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 5:52 pm
Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.
We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you. We promise not to trash the place too much.
As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web.
What do we mean by the real-time stream? It’s popping up nearly everywhere you care to look. Information on the Web is coming to us increasingly in streams. Twitter kicked off the shift, but everyone from Facebook to FriendFeed to Google to AOL is quickly adopting the information stream as a dominant mechanism for distributing data to people exactly when it is produced. As I’ve written before: “The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” RSS is dead. Long live the stream.
A whole new set of products is cropping up around these information streams to help consumers filter them and manage their flow, such as Tweetmeme and Seesmic Desktop. It seems as though a new one is launching every day. And the real-time stream is beginning to impact other parts of the Web as well, such as search and corporate reputations.
It is time to figure out where all of this is going, to bring together the smartest people we can find and map out the different paths the stream can take. We’ve just begin to organize this mini-conference, but already the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word. TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be hosting the event.
Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will be there, and we are just getting started (stay tuned for full lineup). Companies pushing real-time streams to new levels will also be demoing their products, some which haven’t yet launched publicly, such as Andrew Baron’s Magma. (If you have an eye-opening demo or want to launch a product at the CrunchUp, please contact our conference producer, Asad Akbar).
Additional participants will be announced in the coming weeks. If you’ve got some real-time hotness to share, contact us. You will be able to find the speakers, agenda and details as they evolve here.
The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10, between 9:00 am and 4:30 PM at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Tickets are $295 and are on sale now through Eventbrite. Admission to the August Capital party is automatically included in your CrunchUp ticket (with expedited check-in to August Capital.)
The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.
We’ll plan to release the first batch of August Capital meet-up tickets the week of June 15, but we’d really love to spend the whole day with you real time. Hope you can join us.
Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)
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The Real-Time Stream And 4th Annual Summer CrunchUp At August Capital
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 5:51 pm
Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the “Skeeball economy” into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Mahalo two years ago, his staff and free workers on the Web (AKA, the Mahalo community) have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in Google search (about two thirds of his traffic comes from search engines). But Mahalo is hitting a ceiling in page creation because the wiki approach is just too slow and complicated. So it is launching a completely new design which makes it much easier to create pages and—here is the Skeeball part—rewards people with “Mahalo Dollars.”
These Mahalo Dollars, which Calacanis first started distributing in his Q&A site Mahalo Answers, can be converted into real money at an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be saved up to spend in Mahalo itself in the future. Calacanis saw all the activity that was happening on Mahalo Answers, which he says broke one million users last month, and wanted to bring that over to Mahalo proper. Now anyone can claim a topic and create a search results page around that topic or keyword. There is one editor per page and Mahalo will split the AdSense revenues 50/50 for any page he or she makes and maintains. A typical page could generate $20 to $50 a year. If you make 100 of those, that turns out to be some nice pocket change.
The more pages you make, the more points you get and can climb from being a white belt to a black belt. With each new level, you get more privileges. At some point, members will be able to buy and sell pages they have claimed (for Mahalo Dollars, of course). In order to make page creation easier, Mahalo will now assist editors by turning up appropriate links, images, videos, news stories, questions and answers, and more. All you have to do is put in a search term, pick which elements should appear on the official topic page, and write up a short description. It is all driven by APIs in an attempt to bring the appropriate information to editor’s fingertips. Mahalo needs to go from 100,000 topic pages to millions of them, and fast. It is using these semi-automated approaches to get there.
Whether or not these will produce the best pages on any given topic remains to be seen. One problem I see is that claiming a topic and the associated revenues will be on a first-come, first serve basis. If someone comes along later with better domain expertise on, say, sushi (see screenshot below), he or she is out of luck. So there will be a bit of a land grab. With that, there is certainly a danger that people will shift from making spam pages to Mahalo pages. Calacanis dismisses this possibility. He notes that spammers will always be able to make more money on their own and that there are too many tripwires in Mahalo’s system to make it worth their while. Plus, Mahalo will yank any pages it deems too spammy.
The bigger challenge for him is to get people to come to Mahalo on their own instead of through search engines. People who come from search engines tend to be drive-by traffic. They look at 1.5 pages then leave. People who come directly or through referring sites look at 4 to 5 pages per visit. Calacanis is doing a lot to get more people to come to his site. Now he needs to get them to stay.
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Mahalo Will Now Pay You To Create Topic Pages
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 5:12 pm
For years, Microsoft has tried to shrug off its reputation as a monopolistic tyrant. Today comes news that seems to undermine those efforts pretty badly.
The Next Web reports that users of Internet Explorer 6 are being forced to use Bing as their default search engine — even if they’ve manually switched their preference to another search provider, like Google. Attempts to switch the browser to something other than Bing result in an error message.
Update 6/3: Microsoft has fixed the bug and says it should no longer be an issue.
Now, let’s set aside the fact that IE6 is a scourge on the web that opens users up to a wide array of critical security issues and forces developers to implement ugly hacks because the browser doesn’t support many web standards. The fact of the matter is that a sizable number of users are still using IE6 (over 5% of TechCrunch readers still use it, and the global marketshare is closer to 20%). We’re talking millions of users who are potentially affected by this issue.
While the vast majority of users affected probably won’t even notice the change, some are beginnig to complain (you can find threads in Google’s forums here and here). Microsoft has confirmed the issue to Search Engine Roundtable, explaining that it is currently investigating a solution.
Given that Microsoft has long been the target of antitrust cases, there’s no way the company would have done this on purpose. But it’s a hilarious bug nonetheless, and so far there’s no easy way to fix it (expect Microsoft to issue an update in a few days). In the meantime, I suggest any affected users try a modern browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE8.
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Bing Is Now Your Default Search Engine On IE6, Whether You Like It Or Not
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 4:13 pm
“2009 is going to be all about content on the PlayStation 3,” Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton said at today’s E3 press conference at the Shrine Auditorium.
Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times
Sony’s getting in the motion-sensing controller game and releasing the PSP Go, a download-only version of its hand-held console. But the big focus of its E3 news conference today was the huge lineup of exclusive games that it hopes will draw hard-core gamers and boost the last-place status of its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.
“2009 is going to be all about content on the PlayStation 3,” Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton said.
Sony’s PlayStation 3 has sold 22 million units worldwide so far, compared with 30 million Microsoft Xbox 360s and 50 million Nintendo Wiis. The hand-held PSP is at close to 50 million units, while Nintendo’s competing DS has sold over 100 million.
Gamers went into E3 this year knowing that Sony had a stronger menu of internally produced games in the works, including highly anticipated titles such as God of War III, Uncharted 2 and the 256-player online game MAG, all of which were shown at the event.
But there were also several surprising new partnerships with third-party publishers announced for games exclusive to the PlayStation 3. Exclusives for either the PS3 or Xbox 360, which have very similar capabilities, are increasingly rare in the industry and usually require a console maker to provide significant financial incentives, either directly or in the form of marketing support.
After abandoning a long history of PlayStation exclusivity by releasing Grand Theft Auto IV last year for XBox 360 as well as the PS3, Rockstar Games will release — only on Sony’s device — a new espionage game set in the 1970s called Agent. The event’s biggest surprise came from Japanese role-play game publisher Square Enix, which will launch Final Fantasy XIV next year only on PS3. The news drew audible gasps since Final Fantasy XII comes out next spring for Xbox 360 and PS3. Most gamers had concluded that the popular franchise’s days of exclusivity to one console were over and …
… that “XIV” wouldn’t be released for another few years. There also were several new big new games announced for the PSP by outside publishers, including new installments of the popular franchises Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil.
Sony also unveiled several new games it is developing itself for the PlayStation 3 and PSP, including Mod Nation Racers, a driving game in which users can create cars and racetracks and share them online. The game is similar in spirit to last year’s heavily hyped LittleBigPlanet, which also gave users tools to create their own video game levels but sold poorly.
Also shown for the first time were The Last Guardian, a sequel to the critically acclaimed Shadow of the Colossus, and a new installment in the high-production-value racing series Gran Turismo for both PS3 and PSP.
“We intend to ensure that when you think about great gaming, you think about PlayStation,” Tretton said.
Both the motion-sensing controller and the PSP Go, which is more than 50% smaller than previous versions of the device and plays only downloaded games, were expected based on previous reports. Nonetheless, the audience seemed particularly excited by the motion-sensing controller, which uses a camera to track movements and is much more precise than Nintendo’s Wii-mote. Given Microsoft’s new camera interface that doesn’t require a controller and Nintendo’s unique new pulse sensor, it remains to be seen if Sony’s entry will be able to stand out when it launches next spring.
– Ben Fritz
More E3 photos
[via LATimes.com]
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 3:51 pm
Google’s suggested search terms for “Charlies Darwin is.”
Computers can be unintentionally funny. Take the unlikely vein of amusement buried within Google’s search suggestion feature.
Launched in December 2004 as a beta product called Google Suggest, the doohickey attempts to finish your thought as you type a search query. Suggest wasn’t integrated into Google.com or various Web browser toolbars until last year.
Since then, users have found plenty of Google-generated phraseology quirks to snicker about. The most amusing findings have percolated on social bookmarking websites Digg and Reddit.
The game works like this: type a partial search like “Barack Obama is” or “Bill O’Reilly is” into Google.
The search engine then uses a series of algorithms designed to guess the most likely ending to your query, a Google spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Which means the results are derived from actual user queries, not with Google’s software.
Anyway, if those guesses are entertaining enough, snap a picture of the list and submit it to your local social website.
For those too lazy to punch the previous two terms into Google, the search engine irreverently suggests that Barack Obama could be an idiot, a Muslim, a socialist, the Antichrist, “hot” or your new bicycle — whatever that means.
Google offers a similarly variegated list of characteristics for Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, which swings from racist, to idiot and back to the more flattering “nice.”
Type “Charles Darwin is” and you’ll find that in addition to suggesting that the British scientist is, yet again, an idiot — the words “wrong,” and “satan” may be just as likely…
…to satisfy some online searchers.
Then there’s the head-scratcher for “What would Jesus do?” the popular Christian phrase. One option: “What would Jesus do for a Klondike bar?”
The answer is not given.
Another Digg classic is “how long does …” which shows that search engines may be more likely to be used to skirt a drug test than to learn how long it takes to boil an egg.
Even Fail Blog, a bulletin board for the world of the tragically funny, caught on to the meme with an example it picked from Silicon Alley Insider: “I am extremely …”
Of course, hilarity has been expunged from other Google products before. Creed fans (yes, they do exist) weren’t happy with Google’s related search term for “the worst band in the world.” And there’s the array of entertaining moments captured on tape by Google’s Street View van.
The Suggest meme, however, has apparently gotten so out of hand that one Reddit user took it upon himself to manufacture his own version to end the madness. His plea: “please stop.” But why, sir, why?
– Mark Milian
[via LATimes.com]
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 3:12 pm
I’m in New York City right now for Internet Week and considering I haven’t been here in eight years, I’m fairly lost most of the time. I’ve gotten by just looking out for big groups of people with iPhones to figure out where I should be going, but when I’m by my lonesome and just looking to get a quick bite to eat, I basically have no idea where to go. So it’s awesome that Google has just launched a new Android app that lists the places around me.
Places Directory is a straight-forward app created by some Googlers as their 20% time project. When you launch it, it looks up your location and gives you a directory of the types of establishments around. If I click on “Bars” for example, I’ll then get a list of the bars around me complete with a thumbnail image, the location’s distance from me and a star rating. Clicking on any of the listings will take you to a page with an overview of the place, including its address and phone number. You can also read reviews of the place by Google local users and see more pictures of the place.
While there are no shortage of apps on the iPhone that do basically the same task, there are less available on Android. And while some of the apps that do exist focus mostly on restaurants, Places Directly can also find things like ATMs or museums. And even the best apps out there that do these place listing suffer from a lack of information in smaller towns. That won’t be an issue in NYC, but could be in my hometown of Pepper Pike, Ohio. But Places Directory has Google’s huge database of information at its disposal, which means that even in remote towns, you’ll likely have some information about local places.
You can find the app here, or in the Android Market. It’s available for free.
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Google Launches A Location-Based Android App To Save Tourists
Tuesday 2 June 2009 @ 3:11 pm
This is funny. At 10:29 am PST this morning all 2,000 members of the Facebook Developers Group got a message that said “Hi” as the subject and “test” in the body. Since then we’ve received multiple “tips” from Facebook developers with variations of the message “I wonder if they plan on sending out some news soon?”
Well, Facebook should be announcing their annual F8 developer conference some time soon. But our guess is this was just what it said it was – a test message that was sent out by accident.
So many companies would be stoked to see conspiracy theories pop up like this around an accidental test message. What I love about this story isn’t the accidental message, it’s the excited response from the developers.
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Facebook Sends Test Message Saying Hi; Developers Tingle With Excitement
