The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘tickets’

This is the last time we write about this, promise.

But it turns out that a week before the super-liberal TED crowd was shocked by comedian Sarah Silverman’s repeated use of the word “retarded” on stage (so much so that TED organizer Chris Anderson tweeted how “god-awful” she was), she had agreed to donate her time to a fundraiser for children with Down syndrome.

She was ridiculing Sarah Palin’s whole argument that the word “retard” can’t be used.

The crowd, mostly bay area wine and cheese liberals, should have been cheering her on. But it went over their head, and TED stepped in it.

So just to recap, TED invites Sarah Silverman, a shock and insult comedian, to the event to give a talk. She turns up and shocks and insults, but for a good reason. The crowd doesn’t get it even though it plays right into their politics, and the event organizer trashes her publicly. Silverman hits back on Twitter, and there’s a quick cameo by Steve Case in the whole drama. Then it turns out Silverman is already donating her time to help fight the very issue she brought up in the talk.

In honor of the whole episode, TechCrunch is purchasing 10 tickets to Twenty Wonder on March 6 in Los Angeles on behalf of TED and Chris Anderson. If you’d like one of the tickets, let us know below and the first ten get them (say if you want two to bring a friend). Or buy your own. It’ll go to a much better cause than the $6,000 TED attendees spend to feel good about themselves for a couple of days.

As you might have heard earlier today, Google made another acquisition — the email search startup reMail. While its topical description may make it seem like an obvious buy, there’s another layer that makes this really interesting. reMail isn’t just any email search startup, it’s a startup working to perfect email search on the iPhone. Or rather, it was.

Here’s the key part of reMail founder Gabor Cselle’s post about the acquisition today: “Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store.” Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war.

While you might assume this was a pure talent acquisition, there’s something odd: Cselle has already worked for Google in the past. On Gmail. While I’m sure Google is happy to have him back, I’m betting they’re just as happy to kill off what is hands down one of the best email applications on the iPhone — much better than the iPhone’s native email app.

As an advisor for this year’s Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator startup competition at SXSW this year, I had a chance to take a good look at reMail recently. Not surprisingly, it was chosen as one of the finalists (though I’m sure that will change now). It’s sad that other iPhone users won’t get a chance to check out this app now that Google is killing it. But all’s fair in love and war, I suppose.

And make no mistake, this is war.

[image: Dreamsworks]

Last night a bunch of us from TechCrunch went to see the midnight first showing of Avatar. Sure, we’re hosting a screening in San Francisco today at 4, but we just wanted to see it right then.

Verdict: Flawless. Epic. Awesome. I can’t wait to see it again in three hours.

We’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors:

Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools.

Mashery – A powerful API management service.

Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it.

SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed.

The tickets for the screening tonight are long gone, and we have a short waitlist (most of the waitlist should get in). But just for fun we’re giving away five last tickets. Want one? Just tell us a joke (we need a good laugh right now). Just type it in, link to a video, or whatever. Whoever is funniest gets the tickets. We’ll pick the winners at 2.

Here’s one of my favorite all time:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Back in June, Google lost Kevin Marks, one of the social web’s main proponents within the company. Today, they’ve gained a new one: Joseph Smarr.

Smarr is joining Google to “help drive a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web,” he writes on his personal blog today. And it seems like a good fit considering that he had been doing things of that nature for Plaxo for nearly 8 years now. In fact, he was the first non-founder to join Plaxo and helped take the social contact list from a tiny company to one that was bought by Comcast last year for $150 million. Most recently, Smarr was officially Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer.

The transition to Google should be a pretty easy one of Smarr as he’s worked with them as a partner for Plaxo on a number of projects over the years. He’s also well-connected in the social web and is one of the leading advocates of open standards. In that regard, he closely resembles Marks, who is now with British Telecom. “Like all incoming Google engineers, my official title for the first year will be ‘member of technical staff’,” Smarr tells us. “The work is on turbocharging the opening up of the social web,” he continues. At Google, he’ll be reporting the David Glazer, an engineering director.

Smarr notes his excitement for the various technologies that Google has helped develop over the years to make the web a more dynamic place. He also writes that Google is “unmatched” with its commitment to the open web, and standards like OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and others (like Webfinger, a pretty interesting new one, based on an old concept).

That said, Google hasn’t exactly been the most social setting on the web, largely because its services are spread over such a wide range of areas. Facebook, in contrast, is largely a walled garden (that is trying to open up more, to the dismay of some) that has a tightly wound social experience. Google Friend Connect, a key part of OpenSocial, has not be able to gather the buzz that Facebook Connect has, but Google is clearly trying to help it gain steam. It recently revamped the service and even implemented Twitter to help foster its growth.

Speaking of Facebook, they recently hired another one of the key players in the open web, Dave Recordon, who came over from Six Apart. All of these guys travel in the same circles and their interests seem pretty aligned, so it will be interesting to see what, if any, relationships they can foster with their parent companies for the good of the open web.

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

It’s just after 12 o’clock here on the left coast, which means Operation Chokehold should now be in full effect. What that means (if anything at all) is still up in the air — which is why we’re turning to you for a status report.

For the uninitiated: Operation Chokehold is a sort of cyber-protest against AT&T, as conjured up by some dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. For one solid hour between 12 and 1 Pacific, angry iPhone owners are supposed to gobble up as much data as they can in an “attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.”

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Over the last few years, Facebook has held a semi-regular conference called f8, where hundreds of developers come to learn about the site’s development platforms. The event has also been home to the launches of Facebook’s most ground breaking products that have turned the site from “just” a social network into something far more powerful. Today, Facebook has announced the dates of the third f8: April 21-22 , in San Francisco.

In May 2007, Facebook used the event to launch Facebook Platform, which has spurred the creation of 500,000 Facebook apps to date. A year later, the second f8 saw the debut of Facebook Connect, which has since been used to integrate Facebook’s social graph with 80,000 sites (including TechCrunch). Suffice to say, we can probably expect something big coming this April.

Facebook’s blog post announcing the dates is unsurprisingly vague about what we can expect. The site actually actually mentioned the upcoming conference back in October, when it said would was coming in the “first half of 2010″. In that post, it offered some similarly vague details.

We have a lot of work to do between now and the next f8 conference in the first half of 2010 in San Francisco. Our third f8 will bring us back to our roots – building great technology and spurring innovation. We couldn’t be more excited about where we are going together. Facebook is a technology company and we want to provide you with the building blocks to start and change industries.

I’m guessing we’ll at least see its payments system roll out more broadly. But f8 may also be the place where Facebook launches its long-awaited geo-location support, for which developer support will be key.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

“I just emailed you a video. You have to watch it now,” I said to Paul Carr, my resident TechCrunch partner-in-crime.

“Why are you sending me a video about….farm equipment?”

“Just watch it.”

“Oh my God! What is it doing to that tree!?”

“Turn up the volume. You have to hear the music.”

I probably could just embed said video and hit publish, but the Colossus—the world’s largest and possibly most badass olive harvesting machine—deserves a few more words than that. And so does the company behind it, MaqTec, which spent ten painstaking years building a business that sells $500,000 pieces of farm equipment from the middle of nowhere in Argentina.

I know, farm equipment isn’t really a regular beat at TechCrunch, but take away the product and the story of the Colossus is just like any story of a scrappy software, hardware, Web or gaming company that saw a big innovation hole in the market and decided it could go up against bigger, lazier competitors who’d dropped the ball on innovation. Only in this case, it wasn’t Microsoft or Yahoo. It was John Deere and Caterpillar.

To be fair to those lazy giants, the Colossus is attacking (and if you watch the video, you know that’s the right word) a small farming niche: High-density olive groves. But that’s exactly how most successful Silicon Valley startups skip around the plodding feet of tech giants: They find a market opportunity big enough to be a business, but small enough the big guys won’t see it or care about it. (Yet.) That was the formula for Intuit, Adobe, Siebel or more recently Flickr and YouTube.

I met Martin Bonadeo and Jose Mourelle, MaqTec’s founders, at Endeavor’s International Selection Panel in Patagonia two weeks ago and was so captivated I trucked out to Venado Tuerto Santa Fe—aka the middle of Argentina— the following week to see the machine in person. It was a long drive full of pretty much flat farmland. “If you’ve seen Iowa—you’ve seen Argentina,” Bonadeo said.

But it gave me plenty of time to hear Bonadeo’s story. This guy isn’t Indian, but trust me, he’s got enough Jugaad to fuel Argentina for the next forty years. Simply put, this is a company that never should have succeeded, but did through smarts, trial-and-error and sheer “no-we-can-build-this-company-in-rural-Argentina” force-of-will.

The idea was born back in the late 1990s. Argentina offered a tax benefit to encourage the planting of some 70,000 hectares of olive trees in poor areas of the country. Argentina had less than 20,000 hectares before the change. The catch was these groves had to be high density, a minimum of 300 trees per hectare. The incentives have worked well enough that Argentina’s Ministry of Economy and Production estimates that the country could be a top ten producer of the world’s olive oil supply within the next decade.

Olive groves take about three years to mature and Bonadeo—a self-proclaimed “soybean man” and long-time farmer—noticed a problem before a lot of other people: Who was going to harvest all these olives? Harvesting olives is expensive and time-consuming and has to be done in a 70-day window. There just wasn’t the labor in Argentina, especially given the high-density plots. It would take 800 people to harvest 1,200 hectares. “That’s more like a military operation than agriculture,” Mourelle says.

So began years of trial and error building the Colossus, a huge machine that, crassly put, looks like it’s having its way with an olive tree. The machine straddles a row of trees and rubber tentacles gently swat off the olives at rapid speed. The arms can move in and out to hug the canopy of the tree—all controlled by a joystick in the air-conditioned, comfortable cab. The company is doing roughly $4 million a year in revenues and sells the machines in six countries. The Colossus increases productivity ten-fold and cuts harvesting costs by a third once the cost of the machine is paid back.

It was a humble beginning. Bonadeo barely had a working prototype and no customers. There’s no such thing as venture capital in Argentine farm country. Without money, he couldn’t build more machines. Bonadeo used to befriend olive farm managers to find out when the owners would be in town. He and his team would crowd into a van and tow the Colossus over for cold calls. Sometimes he was laughed at, sometimes the owner wouldn’t be there after all. “There’s no way you guys can build this business from here,” potential buyers said, even when they saw the machine working. It was disheartening.

The only reason the first Colossus was sold was luck. Two farms were close to signing, but not quite ready to commit to the pricey $500,000 sticker price. So the smaller one called up the larger one and offered to split it with him and share the machine. Simply out of Argentine machismo the owner of the larger farm decided he wasn’t going halfsies on any farm equipment, called Bonadeo into his office and said he had five minutes to make a sale.

“What’d you say?” I asked.

“Hamana…hamana…hamana…” he joked.

It didn’t matter what he said, the man bought one anyway. Soon after that an Australian company placed and order for three machines. Three! “Not bad, fat boy,” Bonadeo said to himself. MaqTec was in business.

Today, it’s still an uncertain slog. Mourelle is the salesman and he spends much of that time flying around the world selling machines, while Bonadeo manages everything on the ground. He spent much of the week before his Endeavor pitch trying to get some Swedish tires out of Argentine customs.

I have to admit my original hope in driving so far to see the Colossus was that they’d let me drive one. Mourelle told me I only needed to watch a 45-minute instructional video to be qualified. (I love South America.) But alas—due to such constraints in parts and working capital—there wasn’t one with tires that wasn’t already sold and at a customer’s farm. But seeing how one was built was more impressive in person. Not because it’s elaborate but because the “factory” is so sparse. Each machine is comprised of parts from scores of local vendors and international companies and welded together in big, open garage-like workshops. Sure the rooms are big, but so is the Colossus. It’s hard to fit more than one in there at a time.

The biggest concern over MaqTec’s future isn’t so much John Deere building a me-too product. Should the Colossus become a serious enough threat to the $23 billion company, it’ll likely do what the big tech companies do: Make MaqTec an acquisition offer.

The bigger concern is whether Mourelle and Bonadeo have it in them to keep slogging away at a difficult business that’s made only more difficult by capital constraints and the challenges of building a company amid the soybean fields of Argentina. The two are definitely tired. They probably need some money and definitely need to fill out their management ranks to give each of them a break. But I’m not giving up on them. On paper, they shouldn’t have made it this far. They’ve innovated in a forgotten space with huge competitors in a place with no inherent advantages. What’s managing growth compared to that?

Watch the video below to see the Colossus in action. [NOTE: The bizarre similarity between MaqTec and TechCrunch’s logo and video intros are just sheer, weird coincidence.]

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

The wait is finally over for James Cameron’s Avatar, and we’re holding a private screening tomorrow afternoon to celebrate. The screening is at the AMC Metreon 16 (at 4th and Market) in downtown San Francisco on Friday the 18. Seating starts at 3:15, and you’ll need to be there by 3:45 or we’ll have to give up your seat (once the tickets sell out Eventbrite will open up a Waitlist). The screening starts at 4 PM sharp. Our last batch of tickets have just gone live here at Eventbrite.

In light of the holidays, we’re asking for a $5 donation per ticket, all of which will go toward either the UCSF Foundation or Malaria No More(your choice). We’re very excited to announce that we’ll have Square — the new mobile payment system from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey — at the screening. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, we’ll be accepting further donations toward UCSF Foundation and Malaria No More. These will be totally optional, but you’ll be able to count yourself among the first people try out the exciting new system.

If the tickets sell out by the time you read this, don’t fret too much — you still have a chance to get one. We’re holding a contest in the comment thread below. To win, tell us why you absolutely must get into the screening. Creativity is encouraged. We’ll pick the ten best responses and Email you at 6 PM this evening (make sure to use your real Email address).

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors:

Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools.

Mashery – A powerful API management service.

Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it.

SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed.

UPDATE: Ticket capacity has been reached. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

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

It’s that time of year again, when the brash culture of Silicon Valley crashes into the two hour lunch European startup crowd at the Le Web conference in Paris on December 9-10. It’s chaotic and sometimes combative, but it’s also one of the best startup events in the world. And this year TechCrunch Europe is partnering with Le Web to put on a 20-company startup competition.

Yes, I’ll be attending this year, despite the fact that the audience last year voted not to invite me back after my post criticizing European startup culture. Time heals all wounds, or something.

Organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur talk about the conference in the never ending video below. Get your tickets here. This event always sells out, so make your plans now.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

iLike is launching a new iPhone application today that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 update’s new features in some of the best ways that we’ve seen yet. Dubbed “Local Concerts”, the application lets you follow any artist you’d like and receive alerts whenever they announce that they’re coming to a local venue. For anyone who has ever tried to keep tabs on their local music scene, this is going to be a must-have. You can grab the free app here.

Using the app is pretty straightforward: it allows you to view all venues in your area, with concert listings for events that are going on in the near future or further down the line. But it also includes a number of nifty features that the iPhone didn’t previously support. One of these is automated personalization — the application can look at your iPhone or iPod Touch’s library, and determine which artists you should probably be following (though you’re free to adjust the list on your own). Once you’ve found a concert you’d like to attend, the app includes links to sites where you can purchase tickets. Whenever you’ve got an alert, you’ll see a message pop up on your iPhone (much like an SMS message would) regardless of if you have the application open.

Now, iLike has previously offered a more basic application on the iPhone but it was much more basic — if you forgot to check the application manually, you wouldn’t know that your band was coming to town or their tickets were about to go on sale. And the old app didn’t have the automatic artist detection, either.

The one thing I wish the app did have was an option to not only determine which artists you’d like to follow based on their appearance in your music library, but also to take into account the number of times you actually listen to those artists. Obviously this would make things a bit more complicated, but there are plenty of artists I have on my iPhone simply because I feel obligated to fill the device’s storage space to the brim. In any case, iLike’s current suggestion system will be plenty helpful for most people. You can see it in action in the video embed below.

Alongside today’s launch, iLike is also releasing some of the initial stats for its custom iPhone app platform, which it launched in May. Over 250 artists have now used the platform to build their own applications, including Reba McEntire, Ingrid Michaelson, and Rusted Root. The applications allow artists to build rich iPhone apps — including music, video, concert listings, and Twitter feeds — with a minimum of effort It also taps into iLike’s syndication platform, which means content can be delivered to iLike’s 50 million fans easily.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.