From TechCrunch, popular since 2 monthsJust because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of goods for sale does not mean that consumers will start wanting more obscure items in any great numbers. That is the conclusion Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse comes to in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that Go to site
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Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers - 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers - the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted “full and complete” streaming coverage of all speeches.The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski).
TechCrunch50 is just a week and a half away. The list of presenting companies is kept strictly confidential until the day of the event to ensure maximum audience attention. But we're making one exception this year. Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg's Katalyst Media will be launching Blah Girls, one of his new interactive online video products, at TechCrunch50.Ashton recorded an intro video for Blah Girls letting us know how excited he is about all of the confidentiality and rehearsal requirements around the event.
Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn't attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn't make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.
Bungee Labs, a well funded Utah based startup that left private beta only six months ago, laid off 15 employees today to give themselves more runway on their cash burn rate. The last we checked they had 38 employees, so this is nearly 40% of their total headcount.
Online dating site SpeedDate has raised $6 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. SpeedDate offers users a series of 3 minute mini-dates, during which they can converse through video, audio, and a chat box. If both partners decide they were a good match when prompted at the end of the date, they can continue communicating through the site until they make the jump to real life.When we first wrote about SpeedDate, the site had a small userbase, which made it difficult to conduct a series of dates (there simply weren't enough potential matches). Since then the site has grown substantially (claiming 100,000 dates daily), so you can hop on and hope to find a reasonable match within a few minutes.
Attorneys representing online video sites around the country are salivating today over the Veoh summary judgment decision (I know this because I've spoken to a few of them). In a nutshell, here's what we learned today: If you take reasonable precautions against copyrighted materials on your service, you may be ok. And oh yeah, if you are going to get sued, try to get sued in federal court in northern California, because the judges there are a lot more Internet-friendly than some other federal judges we've seen.Specifically, the court said that online video sites are protected under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA if they:
BackType is the newest YCombinator startup to launch from their summer program. They're a blog-comment focused startup - founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.
The business card needs to die, and everyone knows it. They're clumsy, easy to lose, and virtually useless unless you take the time to enter them into your computer's address book (they kill trees, too). The cell phone market could easily put business cards out of their misery, but instead of conforming to a single standard for contact exchange, handset manufacturers offer proprietary solutions or none at all.FriendBook, an iPhone application from Tapulous, looked like it might hold the answer. The app uses a physical "handshake" to swap information - users simply put their iPhones next to each other and shake them. Granted, this would only work on iPhones, but it could have paved the way for similar apps on other phones. But as of yesterday the fate of FriendBook is now in jeopardy due to the departure of its lead developer (and Tapulous cofounder) Mike Lee. So is all hope lost?
As many of our readers have noticed (and noted) already, we rolled out a new design for TechCrunch yesterday evening. And while we're still making lots of small changes, we wanted to take a second to write a proper post explaining our intentions and soliciting your feedback.
Today CrunchGear reviews the $549 Palm Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile Smartphone with the good looks of the Blackberry Bold and the goodness of unlocked G.S.M. with 3G and G.P.S. support.