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Posts Tagged ‘britney-spears’

Brands are increasingly prominent on the App Store and Apple tends to love featuring folks like Britney Spears and Coca-Cola on the App Store’s front page. But who’s actually succeeding and which brands have managed to maintain high download numbers?

PositionApp, the app that lets you track how iPhone apps are doing on the App Store rankings, might have the answer. They track and record the top 300 apps across all demographics and have provided us with details on the top 15 apps in the US App Store. Hit the jump for the list.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Every generation thinks that they are the first. The first to feel this way or that, the first to make this or that revelation, the first to do and make things that we find later have been done and made since before we could record their doing and making. But while these illusory and fleeting firsts are common to every generation, there are true firsts being achieved constantly, though they are often subtle enough that they are not noticed even by those in their midst. My generation has been lucky enough to be part of a very important first.

At no other time in history, and perhaps never in the future, will there be a group of people whose own growth and maturation is so perfectly reflected in the principal technological and cultural advancement of the age.

Continue reading…

Social commerce site Groupon is on fire. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it or trying to copy it. The Chicago-based startup just hired a big gun. Rob Solomon is joining as the company’s president. Solomon is a venture partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, which he joined after selling travel search engine SideStep to Kayak for $200 million. He was the CEO at SideStep, and prior to that was the VP of Yahoo Shopping.

Now will help lead fast-growing Groupon. Founder Andrew Mason will remain CEO. “Social commerce is something I have always been fascinated with,” Solomon tells me. He thinks that the virality that comes with online social connections will take e-commerce to the next level. Groupon offers group buying at the local level which is only triggered once a certain minimum number of participants agree to buy. As local businesses try to figure out what will replace the Yellow Pages and radio advertising, Groupon hopes to fill in that gap.

The company’s “growth is spectacular in revenues and users,” says Solomon, without going into more details (but the numbers are spectacular enough for him to move from sunny Silicon Valley to Chicago). The company operates in 45 markets, has made 2.5 million group purchases on behalf of customers so far, and says it’s saved them $117 million. Groupon recently raised $30 million at a rumored $250 million valuation. And, yes, it is still hiring.

Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.

The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it’s place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.

I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my  ‘key learnings’ from the event.

1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot.

2) Gabe Rivera from TechMeme loves bookmarks. How else to explain his glee when he discovered that each of the four million free copies of Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘ scattered about the conference contained a little strip of cardboard sponsored by Amazon. “Cool. I can use these for my other books,” he exclaimed, removing each bookmark and pocketing it before carefully placing the books back on the table.

3) Even with a back-cover quote from Neil Young, you apparently can’t give away Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘. At the start of the day, there were towering piles of the thing on every surface – one free for every attendee. By the end of the day: towering piles of the thing on every surface, ready to be returned to the publisher. Perhaps Benioff should have taken a leaf out of his own playbook: Play #42 reads “Don’t Dis Your Product With A Discount”, with Benioff explaining that “I wouldn’t even give my own grandmother a discount.”  Yet apparently he wouldn’t think twice about giving the whole book away to a room full of the only people who are likely to actually buy the thing. (My book didn’t win its Congressional Medal Of Honor by being given away free).

4) At TechCrunch conferences, even the food is patriotic. After the American flag next to the judges table debacle at TechCrunch50, I was worried that Arrington might shy away from overt displays of Americanness at future events. Not so – inside the meal box provided to each attendee was a disposable handwipe, packaged inside a little stars and stripes pouch. To reaffirm my love of this country, I stuck one of the pouches to the front of the podium on the stage.

5) Dogs frighten room service waiters, but love Gabe Rivera from Techmeme.

And so to my panel – and to be honest, I was a little anxious at the thought of it given that my fellow participants were Erick and five marketing experts – Sean Rad of Ad.ly, Ryan Amos of DailyBooth, Jesse Engle of CoTweet, Philip Nelson of NewTek and Robin Bechtel who acts as ‘digital agent’ to Britney Spears amongst others.

Erick was on my side, of course, but even he and I have a checkered history, due in large part to the fact that I keep finding excuses to bring up his Last.fm story. Keen to smooth things over beforehand, I went via CBS’s San Francisco HQ on my way to the conference and picked up a Last.fm tshirt for him. You know, as a peace offering. He didn’t wear it, but I know he appreciated the gesture. (”You fucker,” he said, which I gather is New York for “thank you.”)

Even with Erick placated, I was still terrified by the marketers. I’m an editorial person and so these are not My People – in fact I’m obliged to close my ears whenever the subject of monitzing my words is raised. What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.

Worse still, these weren’t even the usual kind of marketers – people who sell banners and display ads and the like – but rather a new breed who made their living by trying to slip commercial messages into our every day interactions. Take Bechtel – her most recent professional triumph was convincing a gaggle of Perez’ Hilton’s celebrity friends – Lady Gaga, Katy Perry et al – to promote a new Warner recording artist by Tweeting the words “Who is Sliimy?” to their armies of followers. Sure enough, within a few hours, the question made it to the top of the trending topics list, presumably resulting in a whole load of record sales for Sliimy. To Bechtel this is a great result, whereas to my mind the idea of one Warner artist whoring and shilling for another that they hadn’t even heard of is just about the most hideous abuse of fandom since Jordy Chandler.

(Sliimy, by the way, is pronounced ‘Slimmy’ rather than the more appropriate ‘Slimy’. Also, he’s French, famous, and entirely irrelevant to the wider digital conversation. I expect he’ll be at Le Web.)

And then there was Ad.ly’s Sean Rad. If you’re not familiar with Ad.ly’s product, then put a pencil between your teeth and read this profile of them by the NYT’s Brad Stone. I quote… “Tuesday was another typical day for John Chow, blogger and Internet entrepreneur in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s with customized faces, messages and colors.”

Get thee behind me, Ad.ly.

During the panel, Rad explained more about his business and his view that Twitter streams should be seen as ‘real pieces of content’ that should therefore be ‘monitzed’. In response to Erick’s suggestion that people might not welcome this ‘monitization’ of their conversations, he responded that many of the company’s advertitweets included an appeal for followers to ‘please retweet’ the ads posted in their friends’ streams. According to Rad, thousands of people did precisely that, proving that people were embracing the ads. I politely disagreed, pointing out that people – by and large – are fucking idiots who will retweet anything if you tell them to. A couple of weeks ago, as a comment against the ridiculousness of those who beg their followers to ‘please RT’ the most mundane of messages, I twittered the message “I’m going for lunch. Please RT!”

People did.

And yet, despite the jovial back-and-forth – at one point I accidentally called Rad a dick – we actually managed to end the session with something approaching a consensus. The trigger for this consensus was Erick inviting Robert Scoble to come on stage and explain his vision of the future of monitized twittering.

Scooby’s vision is the ‘Super Tweet‘, a taggable, more contextual tweet that would enable advertisers to serve commercial messages based on what people were already talking about. Critically, these messages would appear in a separate panel in the Twitter client, rather than invading the stream itself. It’s a vision that seemed at odds with that of Twitter’s COO Dick Costollo who, speaking earlier in the conference, hinted that the company’s upcoming ad strategy might blur the old church and state lines. “We want to do something that’s organic and in the flow of the way people already use Twitter” he said, “and not Here’s the tweets and here are the ads.’”

Scoble argued that “you can display ads in the Twitter client but you don’t fuck with editorial” – and as such his idea seemed totally fine to me – why shouldn’t Starbucks deliver ads to people who tweet about going for coffee, as long as those ads appear in a clearly demarked window? And, hell, why not go one stage further: perhaps some of that revenue could get kicked back to the people making the tweets – the “content creators”? That would certainly be better than sponsored tweets.

It’s a testament to Scoble’s vision, and the marketers’ passion that I left the stage agreeing that, even if we disagree on format – there was nothing inherently wrong with monitizing the Twitter stream through targeted advertising. To his credit, Rad even offered to share with me some of their raw numbers so I could see how people interacted with the various commercial messages generated through Ad.ly.

I’d say my feeling of agreement lasted about ten minutes before it was replaced with one of searing outrage.

What the hell was I thinking? Nothing wrong with monitizing the Twitter stream though targeted advertising? There’s everything wrong with it. And here’s why…

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Just look at the conceptual abortion that is the new retweet functionality: everyone in their right mind hates it, but few of us can quite explain why. Let me try. When someone retweeted under the old system, it was the equivalent of standing at the cocktail party and saying to our friends “oh, Dave said something interesting the other day…” and then going on to quote Dave, along with our own comments on what Dave had to say. The quoting of Dave was contextual and appropriate.

By contrast, the new retweet function is the equivalent of us snapping our fingers and making Dave himself suddenly appear in the middle of the party. And, then, without so much as an introduction, Dave starts talking. No context, no invitation – just some crazy dude called Dave talking at us, at our own party.

Adding sponsored tweets will have an even more poisonous effect on the party. There we are, listening to a friend talking about the weather or sports and suddenly – boom – he’s trying to sell us a personalised pack of M&Ms. It doesn’t matter if he explains that he’s been paid by the company to promote their products – the fact is, there’s some dickhead at a party trying to sell us M&Ms. He’s even more unwelcome than Dave.

One of the most popular ideas amongst social marketers is the idea that we will listen to commercial endorsements from our friends because we trust them. Thus, by putting brands into our friends’ mouths, we will somehow trust those brands more by extension. Not for the first time, the marketers have got it backwards. The reason we trust our friends so strongly is precisely because we know that their opinions are not commercially motivated. The moment that ceases to be the case – or we even suspect that it has ceased to be the case – the bond of trust between friends is destroyed. The cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Separating the ads from the conversation might be a less egregious solution but it doesn’t alter the fact that our words are triggering the appearance of commercial messages on the walls of a party. Inevitably marketers will try to further affect these messages by paying commission to popular tweeters, and the less principled of our friends will sign up to whichever ad networks provide the best incentives for monetizing their updates. From then on they’ll be constantly wondering if there’s a way to wedge in a brand, or a product that could bring them a few cents into their tweets. Even if they think they’re just making pocket money from the things they’d talk about anyway, their conversations will become inevitably altered by the presence of commercial influences.

Meantime, the anti-commercial-minded amongst us will resist this new development by avoiding using certain brand names in our conversations, knowing that they are simply giving an excuse for those brands to make money from our friends. Instead of Starbucks and McDonalds, we’ll be sure to criticize S*arbucks and McD%nalds so as to deprive them of the click-throughs. And yet by the simple conscious act of avoiding commercial pressures, we’re forced to consider them – and so the spontaneity and purity of the conversation is destroyed. Either way, the cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell, radio has succumbed to payola, even our schools are brought to you by the letters COCA COL and A. Human conversation is the last area of communication to hold out against the relentless march of commercialisation and it’s our duty, as humans, to make sure it stays that way. So, screw consensus. And shame on me for starting to lean towards it yesterday. Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.

(Please retweet.)

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Today Ning, the platform that lets users build their own social networks, is launching a new feature called Ning Virtual Gifts, bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6 million networks. Virtual gifts have become increasingly popular over the last few years, largely thanks to their popularity on Facebook, and I’m sure plenty of Ning’s Network Creators are eager to cash in on the trend.

Ning is letting Network Creators choose from a library of pre-made virtual gifts, but they’re also free to create their own. This means that the site’s Brooklyn Art Project network can offer gifts that are miniature versions of handdrawn artwork. It also means that the New Kids On The Block network can sell gifts of… the bandmembers’ faces (I do realize that I’m not the target demographic with those, and Britney Spears has seen quite a bit of success selling her face as a gift on Facebook).

Ning will be taking a hefty chunk of the revenue from each gift: after PayPal’s processing fees, half will go to Ning, and the other half will go to the network creator who sold the gift. To help spur interest in the new feature, Ning is giving everyone on a Ning network 100 credits, which is enough to buy one gift (each gift normally costs 75 credits which translates to $1.50).

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Are you still confused about the latest twists in the AP’s copyright infringement case against artist Shepard Fairey for his use of an AP photograph as the inspiration for his famous Obama Hope poster? Just watch this Attack of the Show video in which TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid explains how Fairey was caught lying about which image he used (a story Jason broke on Friday, even beating the AP), but still thinks he has a fair use case.

What this very public fight with Shepard Fairey boils down to, explains Jason at the end of the interview, is that if the AP “can take him down, everyone else will be scared to use AP material.”

Update: Earlier today, the AP filed an amended complaint with the court, noting the change in Shepard’s story. It also added his licensing company, Obey Clothing, as a defendant, suggesting it has evidence that he did indeed profit from the image at some point.

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It’s just weird.

It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of N*Sync and having sex with Britney Spears – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups.  Weird weird weird.

Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood -  clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in.  Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but couldn’t make the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us, rather than US – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.

The subject line of the email read ” US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU” which made me think, as it would you, Holy Shit! All caps! This must be important!

And indeed it was…

Hi Paul

Just touching base with you in regards to your article you wrote regarding Justin Timberlake snubbing the event. Would love to chat with you. Can be OFF THE RECORD and totally CONFIDENTIAL if you prefer.

How much notice did JT people give you guys? Did he call himself personally to cancel? I heard that he may actually be in San Fran, is there any chance he will make it to the after event festivities?

Give me a call or let me know how I can reach you.

Thanks,

xxxxxxx
Staff Reporter, US weekly.

My first instinct, of course, was to fuck with her. To reply with a whole bunch of lies about how Timberlake had sent me flowers, or written me a really sweet note of apology. That would be hilarious, I thought, especially if it ended up in US Weekly. I mean, the fact that their fact checking doesn’t even extend to ensuring that they’re emailing the right person (it was MG’s story) or even the correct organisers (it wasn’t our event) suggests that I could basically send them any old bullshit and see it in print.

But that would be wrong, and unfair. After all, it was MG’s moment, not mine. So I did the right thing.

I fucked with MG…

from    Paul Carr
to    xxxxxxxx
cc: MG Siegler, Melissa Klein
subject    Re: From blog: US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU

Hi Tanisha,

Thanks for your email. Actually the piece was written by MG Siegler,
who I’m copying in to this email, along with Melissa who is handling
PR for the event.

MG would be better placed to tell you either ON or OFF the RECORD how
he heard the news. As far as I know JT sent him a bouquet of flowers
and a hand-written note of apology, which was both sweet and entirely
unnecessary.

Good luck with your story.

Best,

Paul

For good measure, I also Tweeted MG’s reaction to the fictitious flowers. I mean, sure, anyone seeing the tweet would think it was weird that Justin Timberlake would send flowers to a TechCrunch reporter. But then again, they’d also think it was weird that an US Weekly reporter would email me to ask about Justin Timberlake. They might also find it weird that, despite being in town, one of Particle’s main investors was too busy dressing up as the dude from the Facebook movie to attend his own party. If only Sean Parker had shown up at the party, wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby, the weirdness would have reached such a pitch that the world might have fallen off its axis.

But back to me. As I considered the almost countless ways that Timberlake slowly turning into the character he’s playing is weird, it occurred to me that something very weird is happening to geeks and celebrities generally. It’s been happening for a while in fact, starting probably – and fittingly – with Shawn Fanning appearing in the Italian Job.

For their part, geeks are becoming cool. And by cool I don’t mean ironic cool, like Michael Cera in Juno, or fake cool like Abby the would-be Suicide Girl in NCIS – I mean actual geeks are becoming actually cool, to the point where movies are getting made about them.

At the same time, cool people – celebrities, former boyband members, husbands of Demi Moore – are doing their best to become geeks. It used to be that computer club nerds grew up wanting to be celebrities, or at least to have sex with them. Now those same celebrities are so keen to emulate the nerds that they’ve started Tweeting and blogging and investing in startups. Equally, it used to be the natural order of things that rich movie stars got paid millions of dollars to dress up as people with a fraction of their personal wealth, now it’s the precisely the reverse: Sean Parker is paid considerably more to be Sean Parker than Justin Timberlake ever will.

If this trend continues, there has to be a point when the lines on the dorks/celebrities graph cross: when to all intents and purposes the two switch roles. And that day will not just be weird, but also terrifying. Just think of it for a moment: US weekly reports of Larry Page punching a staffer when he finds a green M&M in his dressing room. Scoble passed out in front of the Viper Room, a dozen paparazzo surrounding him, unaware that he’s already uploaded the photos himself to Flickr. And what’s that commotion in the bathroom stall? Oh, it’s just MG making out with a Pussycat Doll. Meanwhile the old-style celebrities will be working late at the office, pushing out a new release of their iPhone app before heading home to catch Arrington hosting the Soup.

Or at least that’s what I imagined as I stood at the party, holding my bottle of water and listening to the expectant hubbub of people speculating as to whether Timberlake might show up after all. We were all pretending to care about Robo.to, of course, but we all knew why we were really there. And at that, came a shout…

“Justin’s here!”

Holy crap! HE’S HERE! All caps – I panicked. I’m terrible at meeting celebrities; I always say exactly the wrong thing. “Roman, great to meet you. Have you met my 12 year old sister? You guys can use my room.” That kind of thing.

Heads turned. If there had been a piano player, he’d had stopped playing and you would have been able to hear a pin drop. But there wasn’t so he didn’t and you couldn’t – and anyway it was soon revealed to be a cruel joke. Justin was indeed at the party, but the geek Justin – Justin Kan from Justin.tv – not the celebrity one whose mere hint that he might show up at a party guarantees its success.

Saddened yet somehow relieved that – for that night at least – the natural order of things remained intact, I took a final sip of my water and headed home, via dinner at In-and-Out Burger. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, I imagined Justin Timberlake partying with the Pussycat Dolls, or drunk dialling Britney Spears or whatever it is that proper celebrities do.

I’m only speculating on that last bit, of course, but what the hell – US Weekly, call me. I’ll Photoshop up some pictures.

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It has come to my attention that the music industry now wants royalties for those 30-second clips of music you hear in iTunes . That, I think you’ll agree, is bullshit

View original post here:
I’m sorry, but we have to ban music. That’s just the way it is.

You know that saying “they don’t make ‘em like they used too.” Yeah, this test conducted for the 50th anniversary of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows it’s a damn good thing because there would be a lot more auto-related deaths. Watch the video above to see what I mean. It’s shocking.

Original post: 
Video: 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air Vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu

A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream.

This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity - Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea. Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Britney Spears has 1.7 million Twitter followers. How many of them would be willing to pay $1, or $10, per month to see a premium stream of her content?

Here’s how Super Chirp works. Unlike Twitpub, where publishers have to create a new Twitter account, Super Chirp works through direct messages (Twitter’s private message system). That means publishers can leverage their existing Twitter accounts to promote the paid streams. Users subscribe to the content on the Super Chirp site, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. They can also visit Super Chirp to see all those paid messages, and sort them by publisher.

This is a natural product for celebrities to embrace. But it’s also interesting for charities - loyal supporters can donate to the charity and get a stream of news relevant to that charity, or whatever. Some news outlets may try to charge for streams as well. I could imagine that at least some of our followers on our main Twitter account would pay to get additional information if it had enough value.

Any publisher that wants to sign up can as long as they have a Twitter account. The publisher sets the price, between $0.99 and $9.99 per month. Super Chirp keeps 30% of the gross, and that includes the Paypal fees. So the Publisher ends up with 70%

I think it’s a fantastic idea that at the very least may prove out the product for Twitter itself. If Twitter launches something like this directly, Super Chirp could become irrelevant quickly. Although, if I were running Twitter and Super Chirp got traction, I’d buy the service and port over the publishers and paying users to keep it all going.

83 Degrees is the same company that launched Power Twitter, a service I’m absolutely addicted to.

You can read more about Super Chirp on the 83 Degrees blog.

Update: Here’s one guy who has already signed up. Looks like he’ll be doing $9.99/month stock tips — but he’d like Super Chirp to up the range.

And it looks like Loren Feldman of 1938media just signed up as well as the “funniest guy on Twitter,” for $0.99 a month. Feel free to leave your Super Chirp profile in the comments if you sign up as well and say what you will specialize in.

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