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With our Silicon Valley screening a success, we’re looking ahead to where else we can spread our geekiness. TechCrunch Screenings is heading to Tel Aviv.

This Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows. Keep an eye for a follow-up post tomorrow evening Israel time for the sign-up link. Thanks to Jay Yun from Trapster, we’ve got photos of the Screening and Meetup in Silicon Valley after the jump.

Thanks to the sponsors that helped make this screening possible:

Kenshoo is an innovator in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) technology and applications with offices in Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco. MetaCafe, an independent online video site, makes it easy to find videos from top content creators - and help discover new ones. Conduit offers an on-demand Marketing Platform that helps more than 180,000 web publishers put their content and applications on a branded community toolbar to increase their site traffic, revenue and brand loyalty.

And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

Star Trek Screening and Meetup - Silicon Valley




Also, thanks to our sponsors that supported the screening in Silicon Valley. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, bought everyone a soft drink at the theater. Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), bought everyone popcorn. SugarSync, a digital life management service that lets user back-up, sync and access documents, photos and music across all of their devices. And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

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

Microsoft’s Silverlight product is most directly a competitor of Adobe Flash. But that’s not who they’re calling out in some data they sent our way today. Instead, the company (or at least their PR firm) is noting that with 300 million installs of Silverlight 2, the platform is installed on more machines around the world than the web browsers Firefox, Safari and Chrome — combined. Damn. Them fightin’ words.

Of course, that also not-so-subtly speaks to Microsoft’s own web browser, Internet Explorer, being by far the biggest in the world — despite falling market share. But it’s a bit odd for Microsoft to call all those other browsers out since Silverlight not only works on all of them, but to some extent needs them, if it’s to survive.

What’s impressive in Silverlight’s big install number is that it’s just for version 2, which was only released about 6 months ago. That was undoubtedly thanks largely to a few huge events that used the Silverlight platform to stream on the web recently: notably, March Madness and President Obama’s Inauguration. And Microsoft is going to need those kind of deals if it’s going to be able to compete with its aforementioned real competitor: Flash, which has something ridiculous like a 99% adoption rate on U.S. web-connected computers.

One of those big partnerships for Silverlight was Major League Baseball’s MLB.com live-streaming service. But back in November, the league announced it would drop Silverlight in favor of Flash. The stated reason was the Flash performs better, though specifics weren’t given. Since that time however, Microsoft has released the beta version of Silverlight 3 and even won an Emmy for the Olympics coverage last summer.

Microsoft estimates that some 300,000 developers and designers are working on the Silverlight platform. But it’s still going to be about big time partnerships in getting people people to use it instead of, or at least along with Flash. I fall into that latter category for that very reason. I have Silverlight on my computer simply to be able to stream Netflix movies. That’s a huge partnership for the platform, and one that isn’t likely to go away considering that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on Microsoft’s board of directors.

Microsoft recently revamped its Silverlight blog and is looking for feedback on it.

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

Comscore has a fascinating post today talking about the relative decline in paid search ad clicks when compared to search query volume in the U.S. Search queries are up 68% in the last year, but paid clicks are up only 18% in the same period.

Comscore says the reason for the decline is that there are less search queries that show ads, and proposes that a reason for less ads is that searches are getting longer, up from an average of 2.8 words per query a year ago to just over 3 today. Comscore says: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Yeah I’m not buying that.

The reason there are less ads on search results, I believe, is that there are, simply, less advertisers. Far less. Big spenders, the category leaders, are just gone. Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores. And more are on the way. All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.

Efficient Frontier says of Q1 2009:

“Search engine spending was down overall by 13% YOY and 3.3% Q/Q. The relationship between spending and ROI trends shows that advertisers continue to adjust their budgets to compensate for the economic downturn and to improve ROI. Monthly spend trends indicate that the additional decline in search engine spending in Q1 2009 was directly linked to the decline in ROI between November 2008 and January 2009. As ROI continued to decline, advertisers continued to cut their budgets in an effort to become more efficient.”

and

“CPCs are down across the board by 19% YOY and 13% Q/Q indicating that the entire marketplace is deflating as advertisers cut budgets and spend less. On a Q/Q basis, CPCs have declined by 14% on Google Search, 7% on Google Content, 28% on Microsoft Live Search, and 16% on Yahoo Search in Q1 2009 over Q4 2008.”

I agree with Comscore that the main driver for the decline in ad coverage are improvements in ad targeting, particularly by Google. But the secondary driver, it seems to me, has nothing to do with query length. Perhaps it’s simply because so many advertisers are no longer advertisers. Drawing a line from that to less ad impressions is fairly straightforward.

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

Our opening night screening of Star Trek tonight in Redwood City is totally sold out, but we’ve held back ten tickets for a special Trekkie caption contest. The rules are simple: leave a comment with a funny caption for the photo above, and we’ll pick out the five best entries, who will each win a pair of tickets. We’ll choose the winners at 2:45 PM PST (be sure to leave your real Email address so we can contact you).

We’re also opening up a waitlist for the movie, which you can sign up for here. We’re thinking that the first 20 people (and possibly more) on the list should make it, but you have to be there in person and there are no guarantees, so give it a shot if you don’t mind potentially getting turned away.

For those of you who already have a ticket, we’re going to be letting people into the theatre beginning at 6, so get there before that if you want a good seat. Feel free to leave a caption if you already have a ticket, just be sure to note that you don’t want to be in the running (likewise for those of you who aren’t in the San Francisco Bay Area but want to show off your Trekkie wit).

The movie begins promptly at 7 PM at Century 20 Theaters in Redwood City, and after that we’ll head over to Red Latern for some drinks (everyone is welcome, even those of you who can’t make the movie).

Thanks again to the event’s sponsors: Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, is buying everyone a soft drink at the theater. Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), is buying everyone popcorn. And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

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

We’ve got a few more tickets to the Star Trek screening tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in Redwood City (see here and here for more details). We are letting people in at 6 p.m., so get there early. We’re paying for the price of the ticket, and charging a $2 fee to minimize no shows. After the show we’ll meet at the nearby Red Lantern for a drink or three.

Get your tickets here. And we now have three sponsors for the event. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, is buying everyone a soft drink at the movie theater (remind me to disclose this when we write about the new search launch). Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), is buying everyone popcorn (woohoo). And Eventbrite is helping with the cost of the tickets. Thanks very much, Star Trek sponsors.

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

Sorry school-skipping teenagers and spouse-cheating losers, AT&T has launched FamilyMap, which will track a phone’s location either by GPS or cell-phone tower triangulation on a Microsoft Live Map. Other providers have offered similar services for a while, but now AT&T has gotten into the big brother spy game

Read more here: 
AT&T launches FamilyMap, let the spying began