14 Oct
Our own co-editor Erick Schonfeld is currently chatting on WatchMojo Live. He’s being interviewed by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan about the site and other random things. Watch it below.
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7 Oct
With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, wwwgoogle.com points to Google, wwwyahoo.com points to Yahoo, and wwwmicrosoft.com points to Bing (though, interestingly, Microsoft does not own wwwbing.com, that’s a squatter). Someone pointed us to a great one of these today: wwwtwitter.com.
Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.
No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out.
Here are some other incorrect www addresses:
Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well.
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30 Sep
Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends.
Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch.
You’ll remember that back in May, we said thank you and good bye to our third-party sales agent, Federated Media. Heather, our CEO, decided our network metrics were strong enough to stand on their own. Turns out she was right (again).
Since May, the TechCrunch network has added nearly 3 million additional readers and 6 million pages views. Our September audience stats now stand at more than 10.5 million unique readers (7 million from our sites and 3.5 million from RSS) and more than 22 million page views.
To handle our network growth, we’ve hired Vaughn Brown as Sales Director. He comes to us from IDG where he was most recently working on the InfoWorld and Industry Standard brands. You can reach him at vaughn [at] techcrunch dot com to discuss custom programs and sponsorship ideas. And as a reminder, you can also buy impressions direct via our self-serve platform, hosted by isocket.
Thanks for reading and for keeping us growing. Please fill out the survey so that advertisers can understand us better and we can keep paying our writers to serve you better.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Robbert van der Steeg).
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27 Sep
Tech blog TechCrunch and search engine minnow Yahoo may have signed a secret search deal that sees TechCrunch search results offered on default Yahoo searches for tech startups.
There has been no public disclosure of the deal that we have been able to find, and asking for comment would be like asking Iran to embrace Israel, so we only have the evidence to go on.
TechCrunch implemented Yahoo Search BOSS in November 2008. In a glowing review, the site wrote about the positives BOSS provided. By itself, the implementation doesn’t stand out, and given the post was written by former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson (who as far as I’m concerned is beyond reproach), there was nothing in the works then of something more.
But as pointed out to me privately over the weekend, Yahoo appears to have returned the favor, in a fashion that offers a lot more for TechCrunch than they are giving in return by running BOSS on their search page (in the above shot, we searched for brizzly.) While we can’t be 100% sure that Yahoo didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart, the chances of that being the case are slim at best. Couple to that Michael Arrington’s constant criticism of Yahoo’s leadership, and the inclusion of TechCrunch as a Yahoo search option becomes even less likely to be something simply done for the love of an occasionally great tech post.
There’s also a post by Erick Schonfield in August 2009 claiming that “Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing.” I’m sure that the TechCrunch crew like BOSS, but the cheering for the service vs the otherwise negative coverage of Yahoo seems a little odd. I don’t know when Yahoo started offering TechCrunch as a search option, but you get the feeling that there was a strong relationship between the Yahoo Search team and TechCrunch in recent months.
To some degree, I’d say that congratulations to Michael Arrington and the TechCrunch team are in order, because what ever they’ve managed to pull off will be a huge boost for the site. Yahoo may be the search minnow, but as we’ve seen in our own stats at The Inquisitr recently, they still have the ability to drive some really good traffic. I’m sure with the fullness of time though that Michael Arrington will disclose one way or the other the details of the close relationship Yahoo and TechCrunch now have.
25 Sep
Continue reading Steve Ballmer talks ‘three screens and a cloud’ and more with TechCrunch
Filed under: Cellphones, Software
Steve Ballmer talks ‘three screens and a cloud’ and more with TechCrunch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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22 Sep
Technology blog VentureBeat has announced this morning at the DEMO conference that it has acquired crowd sourced company database startup Tradevibes for an undisclosed sum.
VentureBeat is renaming the service VentureBeatProfiles, and selling the new incarnation as a platform to “discover, research, and share information and opinions about companies.” Along with the core TradeVibes data and platform, VentureBeat is promising that the site will become even better — “making it much more useful to the hundreds of thousands of users that visit VentureBeat each month.” Additional features include support for press releases and conversation tracking.
The acquisition of Tradevibes by VentureBeat is being pitched as positioning VentureBeat as a serious challenger to TechCrunch. Why you’d want to challenge TechCrunch to begin with is interesting, but likewise the parallels are obvious: VentureBeat now organizes the DEMO conference (vs TechCrunch with TechCrunch 50), both sites write about serious startups…well, VentureBeat does more often, both sites compete for the attention of the Silicon Valley tech community, and now both sites sport a company database.
Tradevibes parent company Mill River Labs was funded by a $900,000 round in March 2008 from investors incuding Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, Dave McClure, and the Kinsey Hills Group. The company has struggled at times due to its emphasis on crowd sourcing data vs creating it in-house, however its smart outreach in providing joint sites has positioned it as a worthy player in the space.
Disclosure: we have a relationship with Tradevibes for the provision of Qbase (see “Company Database) in the nav bar.
14 Sep
So former Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone just launched his new company, Clicker. It’s like a TV Guide for online video, and the experts named it as one of their favorite companies they saw today. I like Lanzone, but I had to ask: Does a company with a well-known CEO and $8 million already in the bank really need to win our $50,000 prize?
His answer and more about why he’s jumping back into the start-up fray and his “divorce” from Barry Diller on the video clip on the jump.
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14 Sep
DataXu is a Boston-based startup founded by a couple of tech entrepreneurs and MIT alums who are committed to making waves in the online advertising landscape by debuting the first real-time ad optimization system working across exchange platforms from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Essentially, the aim is to bring more power to advertisers – rather than publishers – who are looking to increase the ROI of their online ad campaigns by making it easier for them to make fast decisions based on qualitative data and act on them virtually in real-time. Ad exchanges serve to float unsold and/or undervalued inventory in a pool to be bid upon by advertisers. On the marketplaces, sellers get guarantees about the impressions that will be sold for the highest bid price above the specified reserve, and buyers can use the exchange to supplement their online campaigns with low-cost impressions.
The DataXu platform values, bid manages and buys ads on an impression-by-impression basis, across the major ad exchanges and based on smart algorithms. The platform is said to be capable of processing hundreds of thousands of “ad decisions” a second, each returned in under 100 milliseconds, through automated, campaign-specific algorithms.
Founded in 2007, DataXu has raised $7.8 million to date from venture capital firms Atlas Venture and Flybridge Capital. The startup has been running its system in private beta on Yahoo inventory, is about to add Google’s upcoming Ad Exchange platform – which they say is in fact launching in the next few weeks and will be processing “hundreds of billions of dollars” a day – to the mix and has just added Havas to its roster.
Expert panel Q&A:
Q – Marissa Mayer: On a technology level, it looks impressive. My questions is: are you targetting people?
Ad buyers can build their own data profiles, so you can tweak it to fit your core audience. The Internet is becoming more dynamic, and what we’re doing fundamentally is make decisions quickly, change campaigns in real-time and learn from past behavior.
Q – Paul Graham: What’s the rocket science behind it, the core engine?
A: Our system is designed to find the features that matters for brand, really custom. Advertising is not a one-size-fits-all, you need dynamic, intelligent algorithms.
Q – Tony Hsieh: We’ve dealt with third-party pixels at Zappos, and it causes problems. How do you deal with that?
A: As soon as we can tie data together, we can work, so it doesn’t have to be pixel ads.
Q – Marc Andreessen: What’s your sales model?
A: we can paid on a CPM basis, like an ad server, but a percentage on the lift.
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Extra coverage:
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14 Sep
Remainder aka remnant advertising are not exactly widely known terms, but the average person browsing the web for content knows perfectly well what it is. Anyone who’s ever browsed their favorite news site and has been exposed to advertising units that seem totally off base with the publisher brand, or even completely – even if unintentionally – juxtaposed to the content that’s being viewed has been a ‘victim’ of ads that were placed just to fill up unsold ad inventory, which is what remnant advertising comes down to.
5to1, a startup with a high-profile founding team that includes former Fox Interactive execs Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding to work on a solution that can turn remnant advertising into premium advertising. The company’s breaking out of stealth mode today at TechCrunch50 with a service that could rid both publishers and advertisers of the extremely ineffective ad campaigns that are basically only beneficial to the networks selling them.
The 5to1 system allows publishers to get in between the remnant networks and the ad inventory to give them more control over what will appear on the site, where and when. The company’s founder and CEO Jim Heckman dubs it a “Match.com meets iTunes for advertising” because it allows publishers to dynamically create ‘playlists’ of ad units of sorts and easily run both proper ads and potentially placeable remnant ads on variable places on their website(s).
Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for content publishers to increase the quality of – and with it, the revenue that comes from – the ads that appear on unsold inventory without too much hassle. And if it takes off we’ll see a lot less of these horrible screaming ads that you’d never click on even if they held you at gunpoint.
Expert panel Q&A:
Q – Marissa Mayer: At Google, we agree that optimization can be done. However, what technology do you have for matching content to advertising, and how can you provide for larger-size networks with lots of inventory?
A – Jim Heckman: We’ve been in stealth for a year, but we’ve noticed that publishers like hearing about being able to match advertising with context and having control over it. We didn’t want to compete with the Google model, but we’re more like iTunes: you ‘play’ ads whenever you want. It’s no different than what Web 2.0 has done for content. So if you’re a tech blog on gadget, you can see what ads work for gadget news sites specifically. It’s not algorithmic, but more of a marketplace.
Q – Roelof Botha: Can you demonstrate better CPMs?
A: We can find ads so fast, even with hundreds of thousands of ads in the system, literally in seconds. You can drag and drop ads right in the rotation. We talk to publishers and they tell us that even if we get similar CPMs but just prettier ads that don’t curse with the content, they’d already be happy. But talk to us again in six months.
Q – Tony Hsieh: Does it take a lot of time for publishers to deal with your system, and what about scale?
A: We showed publishers in our beta test that it doesn’t take a lot of time to manage their advertising units on unsold inventory. They want to be involved, and they seem to be motivated with the speed of our system. The key thing is: the compiled results of the entire network shows the context of just one ad in seconds.
Q – Paul Graham: Humans can only do worse than the best optimization, right?
A: Pages are dynamic. What we found is that a vast majority of ads are not contextual, and we can fix that.
Q – Marc Andreessen: Regarding the chart, which side do you lean most to?
A: All inventory is not created equal, but I’d say just in the middle.
Video:
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14 Sep
In between startup sessions at TechCrunch50, we are hosting a number of heavy hitters in a panel titled ‘Creating scarcity, value and brand protection as we face limitless ad inventory” in collaboration with AdMeld. On the panel we have Michael Barrett from AdMeld, Kenneth Fuchs from Sports Illustrated, Kal Patel from Best Buy, Peter Foster from Hi5, Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn from 5to1 and Aaron Broder from Gorilla Nation. TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde is moderating.
Talking about the dilemma that remnant ads pose to quality publishers, Ross Levinsohn cautions: “In many ways I think the Internet has killed itself to a degree because there was a notion that I will just add another page without maximizing the premium spots.”
Live blog:
Kal Patel is talking about Twelpforce, an initiative from Best Buy that taps into the essence of Twitter to leverage customer service.
Ross Levinsohn: Advertising doesn’t always work. Sometimes algorithms don’t function because it lacks a human touch. Big brands and advertisers need that, to not have machines take over where and when there advertising units appear.
Peter Foster: How low are we willing to go. It comes down to what are you wiling to accept and what aren’t you.
The real challenge to us as a publisher is to find a network that is truly premium.
Heather Harde: What percentage of inventory are you direct selling?
Kenneth Fuchs: We sell everything direct.
Peter Foster: We end up selling 5 to 10 percent.
Aaron Broder: Premium programs go beyond selling a box ad. It is really about connecting your ad with a marketer’s messaging. You obviously have to listen to the publisher and what they want.
Michael Barret: Typical publisher at AdMeld has 100 million impressions plus they can not sell directly, and they have direct sales forces. We’ve built this platform that allows publishers to tap into all of these different sources and concentrate on their direct selling.
Jim Heckman: You’re talking about campaigns that are built custom, programmed with a publisher. Something that will be complementary to the brand, ads that the user will relate to and not tune out.
When I was at MySpace, we had a 100 million (billion?) unsold ad impressions. Silicon Valley creates companies looking at the whole world of advertising, we are approaching a trillion unsold pieces of inventory.
When you have a nice ad followed by a fat belly ad after the sold inventory runs out, that hurts the publisher.
63% of all ads aren’t even looked at anymore, Consumers are tuning out.
90% of all ads are unsold, they are machine-based and pushed. So there is uplift, but when you disperse it among the inventory, the individual publishers are hurt.
Ross Levinhson: AT Fox Sports, 70% of the inventory was sold. If we sold out all the remaining inventory, I think in 2003, it meant only $250,000 in revenues. We made a determination that a quarter of a million dollars at that time wasn’t worth the hassle of policing it.
On MySpace, we had to create scarcity where there was no scarcity. So we had the homepage, ad networks were arbitraging. Tom shut that down, no more ad networks on that inventory. If you have a site like Hi5 or MySpace or Facebook, creating billions of impressions a month, you have to find a way to create some scarce inventory so you can talk to the Best Buys. They don’t want to be next to [remnant ads]
In many ways I think the Internet has killed itself to a degree because there was a notion that I will just add another page without maximizing the premium spots.
Kal Patel: We look at how does it actually show up in front of our customers.
Jim Heckman: What has happened is we are selling a small percentage of our quality content, and everything else is going to the remnant networks.
Peter Foster: Also back in the day there were a few dozen ad networks, now there are 500. That is the challenge, there are so many companies doing great work, but it is all being back-filled by the same inventory.
Jim Heckman: I think Ross is right. Creating scarcity in any business is essential. I think you are better off not selling an ad at all on your front age and protecting your ad integrity.
If you are Sports Illustrated and you have a story by a top writer with beautiful images. Do you really want to put a yellow teeth ad up there?
Video:
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