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Posts Tagged ‘situation’

Speaking as someone who lives in a glass house, the confession by InfoWorld that one of their writers was using a false identity and sometimes misrepresenting himself is great, along with the deletion of all his content. But it’s less great when it comes after you’ve been caught.

This is exactly the type of situation we wanted to avoid, and it’s the reason why we published the facts about the Daniel Brusilovsky situation as soon as we fully understood them. We didn’t publish the name of the writer because of his age until he admitted to the situation himself. And we didn’t publish the names of the companies involved because, frankly, they were the victims of the whole thing. But everything else was disclosed as soon as we were sure of the facts.

A lot of people criticized us for “throwing Daniel under the bus” and for otherwise handling the situation poorly. But anyone who runs a news organization knows that the truth tends to come out eventually. It’s best to just air everything out in the open right from the start. And hopefully our readers will know that there’s no funny stuff going on at TechCrunch. If there was, we’d be the first to write about it.

In this case InfoWorld may not have known what was happening until they read about it on a competing website. In fact, they probably would have terminated him as soon as they discovered what he was up to. But it’s not clear that they would have publicly acknowledged it afterwards. And since the story broke before they were able to tell their readers what happened themselves, we’ll never know.

The tragic plane crash which killed three Tesla employees flying out of the Palo Alto airport at approximately 8 AM this morning also took out the city’s power.  The accident has left over 28,000 Palo Alto residents and businesses without power in the heart of Silicon Valley.

According to the data in CrunchBase, up to 240 of these 28,000 customers are local startups, VC firms and other companies which include the likes of Facebook, Socialtext, Tapulous, and VMWare.  (The TechCrunch office is also out of power).

The interactive map below will give you an idea of who else is affected by the outage. We arrived at this estimate by looking at companies who are within a 1.5 mile radius of the middle of Palo Alto; thus encompassing most of the city. Although this is not a perfect number (some companies shown might have power, while omitted companies may not), it is a rough estimate of which startups might be without power.  There is no current estimate for when power will be restored, but the last estimate, as of 930 AM PST, was 5:30 PM PST.

Startups have reacted differently to the outage. While many have moved to nearby coffee shops, such as Starbucks, in order to have access to Wi-Fi, some are simply working from home (assuming they live outside of Palo Alto). A few outliers are taking the day off and enjoying the warm California sun.

If you were affected by the power outage, let us know how you’re dealing with the situation in the comments section below.

Since the crisis in Haiti began, Twitter has played a big part in helping raise awareness of the tragedy. It’s also helped charities and celebrities reach out to the community to encourage donations toward the Red Cross and the other organizations working hard to help the situation. Today, Twitter is launching a portal at Hope140.org for people looking to help Haiti, but who don’t necessarily know where to start.

The site features a collection of recommended tweeters and Lists, including charities and people who are actually reporting from the field. A stream of recent tweets about the crisis is scrolling by in real time. And a large part of the page is dedicated to helping non-profits connect with the Twitter community, as a sort of best practices guide. It also calls out tonight’s Hope For Haiti Now Telethon, which begins at 8 PM EST and is being hosted by George Clooney, Wyclef Jean, and Anderson Cooper.

Twitter’s Biz Stone has also written a blog post about the efforts being made to help alleviate the crisis.

Here’s a list of different ways to text to help Haiti. You can also do it through the iTunes Store.

Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
Text QUAKE to 20222 to donate $10 to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund
Text HABITAT to 25383 to donate $10 to Habitat For Humanity
Text OXFAM to 25383 to donate $10 to Oxfam A
Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele
Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card
Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International

FMyLife’s developer community has a new reason to visit the site this week: to complain about the restrictions the company has recently started to enforce on its API. From now on, FMyLife requires all applications that feature advertising or that have a price tag (e.g. on the App Store) to send 50% of their revenues back to FMyLife. Apps that are available for free, sans advertising, will be able to operate as usual.

For those who haven’t been introduced to the FMyLife phenomenon, the site invites users to leave brief personal stories that generally end in catastrophe or extreme embarrassment. All of the stories conclude with “FML” (or F*** My Life), which has become a catchphrase outside of the site as well. It’s a great Schadenfreude fix, and you may even wind up feeling some empathy for your peers (or not). The site, and the third party applications it has spawned, have proven to be extremely popular.

Now, FMyLife disallowed paid applications and advertising when its API launched in February 2009, but the company has been inconsistent about enforcing those rules. Some developers have offered their applications with advertising for some time. And FMyLife has even approved the use of advertising and premium versions in some cases, without anticipating just how popular these applications could become. As it turns out, some of these applications have turned into big businesses in their own right, and some have proven to be drains on FMyLife’s servers. Rather than kill off all applications that are monetizing the service, FMyLife has decided it wants a cut.

Here’s how FMyLife co-founder Didier Guedj is describing the changes to the policy:

The Fmylife API was created to spread FML stories on the internet for free, in the spirit of sharing. However, in recent months, several developers made a very big business by selling FML’s applications or by advertising on it. This has led us to change our policy:
1) Access to the Fmylife API remains free for those using it for non-business purposes.
2) We will now ask that those who are using Fmylife for profit share their revenue at a fair 50/50.

The recently policy changes are directly related to a conflict FMyLife has had with Enormego, a developer that built two applications for the iPhone: “F MyLife and” “F MyLife Pro”, (the free version was briefly ranked as the top application on the App Store) . Here’s how Guedj describes the situation:

Enormego created two applications for iPhones (”F-MyLife” et “F-MyLife Pro”) which generate consequential revenue (through the sale of the apps, plus advertising) because they got more than a million hits per day since April 2009. These two iPhone applications only work thanks to our website, its concept and content. It was agreed with Enormego on July that any revenue generated by these apps would be split 50/50 (no contract was drawn, just via an email exchange). Enormego has never paid to Fmylife any money, and has not replied to any of our Emails since September. After several warnings without any answers, we decided to cut off their access to the API function. Since, they have been pirating the content of our website to feed their applications. We then asked them to stop. They did, only a few days ago.

We’ve reached out to Enormego for their side of the story.

FMyLife’s motivations for implementing a more restrictive API are obvious: they want to make money off the site they’ve built. At the same time, the FMyLife service has certainly benefited from the efforts of these third party developers — you can be sure plenty of people who downloaded these mobile apps are also frequent visitors of the service’s homepage. FMyLife can do what they want with their data, but it’s clear that they should have been consistently enforcing their policies from the start. Some applications have already been discontinued (or removed FMyLife support) since the change.

All of that said, it does sound like FMyLife would be willing to work something out if a developer has already built an application using the API and objects strongly to the changes. From Guedj:

For new applications (premium or ads), we explain the new rule to their developer and they have the choice to share the future income, or they don’t have access to the API.

We’ve never disabled an application (except Enormego’s) because these developers work hard too, and we respect their work a lot. We talk with them, explain the situation and all of them have agreed easily (for now) with our new conditions.

Image via sjdvda on userlogos.

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

Right now, if I could play a round of Multiplayer Game 2: The Sequel with anyone in the whole world, it’d probably be either Manuel Zelaya or The Situation from Jersey Shore. Zelaya because I’d could ask, “So what’s it like to be the first South American leader in a really long time to be illegally ousted in a coup?” Then I’d tell The Situation, “Hey, you’re terrific. Let’s do 800 sit-ups then pump our fists in the air to the latest episode of A State of Trance.” What?

Originally posted here: 
Survey: Boys want to play video games with President Obama, girls with Miley Cyrus

So I was browsing Pravda, as I do from time to time, when I stumbled upon this fascinating story. It seems that women are far more likely to read a gadget’s instruction manual than men

View post:
Shock: Men are loathe to read instruction manuals, women have no such qualms

It’s a rare day when we post a web comic on MobileCrunch. To my knowledge, we’ve only done it once before .

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XKCD on iPhone vs Droid

The Qualcomm FLO TV is a nifty little device. It plays TV content on a 3.5-inch screen, which could be great for some. But you have it’s $8.99 a month for the service and pay the $249.99 initial cost.

More here: 
The Qualcomm FLO TV is now available if anyone cares

We at CrunchGear love you. Yes you

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CrunchGear wants to kiss you this Holiday

The Eye-Fi card is famous for being a cool, fun way to upload, inadvertently, images of you and your friends naked or on the toilet. Now, however, you can upload those naked photos to your local FTP/FTPS server. This service allows you to bypass standard photo-sharing sites like Flickr and dump your stuff up unfettered by the limitations placed upon us by photo sites.

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Eye-Fi goes FTP