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Posts Tagged ‘thoughts’

An Italian security site ran an interview with Pwn2Own contest winner Charlie Miller about secure systems.

Original post: 
Security expert: Flash is horrible

So the next generation of Windows Mobile, now Windows Phone, has been unveiled at MWC in Barcelona. Greg has already gotten his mitts all over it, and has posted his in-depth impressions over at MobileCrunch, but we thought it was worthwhile to post our thoughts on Microsoft’s new look and feel. Beautiful? Ugly? Too little, too late? Feel free to add your opinions to the pile.

Read the rest of this post at CrunchGear…

Last month, we broke the news about BarMax, the most expensive app in the App Store. At $999.99 (the highest price Apple allows you to sell an app for), the app differentiated itself from the joke $999.99 app in the past because it actually seemed like a solid deal. That is, it’s a solid deal when you compare it to its closest competitor, BarBri, a series of classes that help lawyers prepare for the bar exam. Don’t believe us? Just look at the moves BarBri is now taking to alter its offering just weeks after the launch of BarMax.

BarBri, which typically costs between $3,000 and $4,000, has long had a complete stranglehold over this particular kind of exam prep. Because of that, it was able to charge whatever it wanted. Thanks at least partially to this, it has been subject to multiple class-action lawsuits (again, hardly surprising when you’re pulling this kind of stuff with future lawyers) saying the service was using anti-competitive tactics to maintain their dominance, among other things.

But by leveraging the wide reach of the App Store, it seems that BarMax has found a way around some of this anti-competitive behavior. And BarBri is clearly threatened. The company has begun circulating fliers on law school campuses proclaiming two new “enhancements” for the Summer 2010 classes. The first will grant BarBri participants unlimited online access to course materials with their standard fee. It’s pretty funny this wasn’t included in the several thousand dollar price tag before since it likely costs BarBri next to nothing to grant this access.

The second new “enhancement” is even more indicative of how scared BarBri is of BarMax. For as long as the service has existed in its current states (several decades) BarBri has been using the model where a student pays for the course and if they don’t pass the bar and want additional help, they must pay an additional huge fee (recently, $2,000) to re-enroll in the class. But the new BarBri policy starting this summer will allow students that previously paid, to re-take the course. This seems to be a direct response to BarMax which allowed you to keep the material forever once you pay the one-time $1,000 app price.

This is a great example of why competition in any market is a good thing. BarBri has gone on for decades without bending its offering that students often feel is ridiculously priced. Now, in just three weeks, an app has come along and forced it to do just that.

In response, the man behind the BarMax app idea, Mike Ghaffray, writes, “We are very relieved for the repeater students that can save some money and take advantage of this!” He goes on to note that, “Additionally, they are offering free access to their online lectures for students who pay their exorbitant tuition, but that part is too little too late.“

I asked Ghaffray how the $1,000 app was doing in terms of sales. He wouldn’t give specific numbers but writes, “Sales are doing pretty well actually! I thought most recruiting would have to happen one student at a time on campus (and BarMax has campus reps just starting now at various campuses to give info to students), but I am impressed that total strangers are buying this thing on their phones for $1,000–it goes to show you the amazing reach of the App Store. People are very happy with it too, which is awesome.“

Looking at the App Store page for BarMax, there are 6 reviews of the app. While that might not seem like a lot, it’s usually a small percentage of users who actually review apps. Also remember, the app is only going to interest a very small percentage of the population (currently it’s meant for students taking the California bar exam — other states are coming soon). Also remember, it’s $1,000 dollars. All six reviews give it the maximum 5 stars.

BarMax has also started offering a MPRE app, which students use to prep for a mandatory ethics exam, for free (you can find that here).

[image: paramount pictures]

As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmal and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! “

It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.

Oh, Ziema Lubuska , today is your lucky day! Apparently a games blogger for Gazeta Lubulska (Circulation: Maybe fifty grandmas out in Zielona Gora, Poland) just rocked the world with his review of Bioshock 2 saying that the game is a “Shock” and asking if “this is the direction video games are heading?” While his arguments are slow-witted and dull, it’s definitely giving a small paper in rural Poland a nice boost in pageviews. He presses out all the Polish hot buttons including child abuse and anti-Catholicism, saying that the game makes you use little girls like dogs to hunt down drugs.

View original post here:
Poles are shocked – shocked! – at Bioshock 2

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.

Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.

To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.

The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.

blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.

On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.

After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.

The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.

This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network.

Our attorneys have advised us not to disclose the name of the individual because the person is not a legal adult. We also think that, given the intern’s age, it may not be appropriate to make their identity public.

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Update: Daniel, the intern in question, has decided to talk about this situation publicly on his blog. I’m glad that he has. You can read his thoughts here.

To say I know who Keith Urban is would be scandalous. I’ve since learned, in the six seconds of research done for this here post, that he’s something of a country music singer.

See the rest here:
Oh, now you don’t support music piracy? Sure, OK, Keith Urban, whatever you say.

Okay, so it exists . What do your favorite tech personalities, the CrunchGear team, have to say about Apple’s latest opus?

Original post: 
The iPad: our take

Even teens are getting into M&A. Teens in Tech, a blogging network founded by 17 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, has acquired Yazzem, a Twitter-like microblogging network that allows you to post short thoughts organized by topic to its site, Twitter and FriendFeed simultaneously. Yazzem, which was founded by 14 year olds Zachary Collins and Dustin Snider, was acquired for $15,000. It’s not a huge deal, but these are teenagers, after all. Disclosure: Brusilovsky writes for TechCrunch and he covered Yazzem before buying them. His business relationship with Yazzem’s founders developed after the initial post, which is why we are disclosing it now.

Teens in Tech, which currently features content from 700 bloggers, is meant to offer teenagers a simple way to blog their thoughts in an atmosphere that is both safe and receptive to their ideas. Teens can upload audio, video, pictures and text to the platform. The site launched back in August in a private alpha and today is opening up to the public. The site is also launching a new version and redesign later today which will include featured content on its homepage, suggested users and more. The most significant change in the new version of the site is advertising. Bloggers can also collect money from advertising if they choose to turn the ad feature on their blog. Brusilovsky says that the startup is also going to soon roll out premium features, where users will have to pay for more storage, custom CSS and more.

Brusilovsky hopes the acquisition of Yazzem represents a way to transform Teens in Tech to more than just a youth-oriented blogging platform in an effort to appeal to a broader demographic than teens. Yazzem’s technology will be become a product of Teens in Tech and its founders will join the teen blogging network.

This isn’t the first acquisition for Teens In Tech; the startup snapped up fellow teen blogging site Youth Blogging Network last March. Brusilovsky expects for users to increase more rapidly now that the site is open but it is unclear whether the acquisition of Yazzem will be able to attract older bloggers to Teens in Tech. The network is a laudable effort; especially considering the age of its founder. Teens in Tech even has a conference business. The startup is hosting its second annual Teens in Tech Conference on February 6 at Google’s San Francisco office. Speakers will include Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, Twitter product designer
Vitor Lourenço and others.