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Prosper And Other P2P Lenders Get Squeezed By The Credit Crunch
Prosper and other peer-to-peer lenders like Zopa and Lending Club may turn out to be collateral damage from the credit crisis. Yesterday, Prosper suspended new lending in order to register with the S.E.C to create a secondary marketplace for the loans on its site. As recently as Monday, Prosper didn’t think it would have to register as a seller of securities. But the new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the current financial meltdown has changed all of that.
Lending Club previously had to do the same thing and suspend new lending last April . (The S.E.C just gave it the green light to start lending again on Tuesday). Zopa shut down it’s P2P lending site in the U.S. last week.
Even before the increased regulatory scrutiny, P2P lending took a massive hit along with the rest of the financial industry. As Brad Stone points out in an excellent piece in the NYT:
Monthly loan volumes at the company have been declining since the credit crisis worsened this spring. Prosper, which is unprofitable after raising $40 million in venture capital, now faces the damaging possibility that lenders may take their money off the site instead of waiting for the S.E.C. to allow lending to resume. That could take several months.
You can see on Lending Stats that Prosper’’s membership growth and the number of active lenders and borrowers took a dive starting last April. And delinquencies for loans more than 18 months old are trending at higher than 30 percent. That is because a large portion of Prosper’s loans are in the sub-prime category. People who couldn’t borrow from a bank, borrowed from their neighbors on Prosper instead.
Now they are temporarily shut down.
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What Android Can Learn From the iPhone: It’s the Software, Stupid.
By now, all the first full reviews of the Android G1 phone have come out. This isn’t one of them. You can read CrunchGear’s in-depth review or my initial impressions of the G1 in an earlier post. And there are plenty of other places where you can (re)read about the specs, the slide-out keyboard, and the $179 price.
But I did get my Android loaner from T-Mobile last Friday and have been carrying it around constantly, reading my e-mails on the subway, surfing the Web, and playing with the Google Maps Street View compass feature—when New York City isn’t blocking my GPS. I can’t put it down.
That is not to say that I have set aside my iPhone. In fact, I still carry that around in my pocket as well, right next to the G1. (Yes, I know it’s weird). After living with both side by side for a few days, my initial impression has deepened that the G1 is no iPhone. But I’m also convinced that it doesn’t really matter. The Android is going to be a runaway success once it goes on sale October 22. (Already, 1.5 million are rumored to be pre-sold. Update: That estimate might be inflated, but T-Mobile did sell out of its initial pre-order allotment). The Android and the iPhone together stand in a class by themselves. As I noted in my initial take:
. . .in the end this is not really about Android versus the iPhone. It’s about Web phones versus the brick in your pocket. Simply matching the iPhone on many of these features—especially Web browsing and email—is going to be enough to help redefine the mobile market. The table stakes have just been raised. From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply.
I still believe that, and the apps on Android have a real chance of blowing away the apps on the iPhone some day just because Android is much more open. It lets developers access pretty much anything on the phone, from the camera to the music library (both of which are currently restricted zones on the iPhone). But that is a post for another day. Right now, I’m going to focus on how the Android stacks up to the iPhone in its most elemental features.
How do they compare? Both the Android and the iPhone are very similar in their basic capabilities. They both have large touchscreens, GPS, WiFi, 3G cellular antennas, accelerometers, and a camera. On the software side, the both have fully capable browsers (based on Webkit), Gmail, GPS-enabled Google Maps, a music player, and a whole array of third-party apps that you can browse and download directly from an App Store on each device (Google calls its store an App Market).
So far, so good. Where things break down with the G1 is in subtle differences in the user interface that keep making me stumble and pause to try to figure out what to do next. This is a problem I rarely have with the iPhone. The crux of the problem is that the G1 has too many buttons. There is, I’m afraid, a hardware/software disconnect. Too often on the G1, the hardware gets in the way.
This disconnect stems from one of the G1’s standout features that distinguishes it from the iPhone: the slide-out keyboard and the dedicated buttons below the touchscreen. The keyboard in particular is supposed to be one of the G1’s great selling points. After all, people like pressing buttons, especially when they are typing. But the keyboard actually turns out to be superfluous.
As a former Crackberry addict, I never thought I’d say this. But once you get used to typing on a touchscreen, it turns out to be easier and faster than typing on a tiny keyboard. It takes a while to realize this, but once you do there is no going back.
Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by my iPhone, but I find its touchscreen keyboard to be much simpler to use. The individual keys are much bigger, especially since they expand as you get closer to each one. I do miss the tactile feedback, but that is replaced by an almost equally satisfying clicking sound when you press each key. And the predictive spelling takes care of most mistakes.
Instead of offering up a keyboard whenever you need it, the G1 forces you to switch modes whenever you want to type. That involves flipping open the screen to reveal the keyboard below. The layout of the keyboard itslef takes a little getting used to. It looks like standard QWERTY keyboard, except that there is an additional “menu” button where the shift button should be. The shift button us below it. But to type secondary symbols like question marks and dollar signs, instead of hitting the shift button you need to hit an “ALT” button. I am constantly hitting the “menu” button out of habit.
Once you finally type out an email, you cannot send it using the keyboard. Rather, you have to hit the menu button, which brings up a “send” option.” The G1 forces you to switch back and forth between hardware and touchscreen inputs all the time. It is annoying and jarring.
This also happens when the keyboard is closed and you are happily browsing the Web, reading through e-mails, or playing with one of the apps. It’s all touchscreen happiness, until inevitably you hit a wall and have to resort to the hard menu button or the dedicated “back” button below the screen. If all else fails, there is the handy “home” button that takes you back to the Android mobile desktop.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m in flying in touchscreen mode, I want to stay in touchscreen mode. What is amazing about both the Android and the iPhone is that they are truly immersive experiences. Don’t bring be back to reality by making me hunt and peck for a hard key.
Another flaw of the Android is that the only way to switch the screen to a horizontal landscape mode is to flip open the keyboard. With the iPhone, you just turn the phone on its side. Android should have copied this because sometimes you want to go horizontal when you are simply browsing the Web. It’s easier to read a Webpage that way. I find myself flipping open the keyboard just to browse the Web, but I’m not typing so the keyboard gets in my way, again. I do like the little roller ball, though. They should keep that. It’s great for playing Pac-Man.
Other pet peeves: Apple’s browser is also a little bit more satisfying. Android resizes everything into annoyingly long columns when you make anything big enough to read. And the iPhone’s screen is a tad sharper, which makes a difference when you are reading tiny print or watching videos.
Android does do some things better than the iPhone. Android has an advantage on pretty much anything that has to do with Google apps. For instance, conversations in Gmail are threaded together. On the iPhone for some reason each response is shown as a separate e-mail, and the default is set to downloading 50e-mails at a time. With Android, you get a lot more. You can also sync easier with your Google data, download all your contacts from Gmail, and Gtalk works like a charm.
Google Maps on Android includes Street View pictures. Coupled with the compass and GPS, you can see a picture of the street you are on or the building in front of you simply by holding up the phone and moving it around. I could easily see Google adding in layers of data, in effect tagging the real world Tonchidot-style.
There’s so much Android could be, and remember, this is just the first phone. But in order for it to have a chance at surpassing the iPhone and becoming the de facto mobile computing platform, it needs to close the gap on its user interface issues. The interface needs to be flawless. Invisible yet always available. For Android, that may be a dream, but it is one that is within reach.
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Help Eliminate Poverty, Make a Microloan to An Entrepreneur
The financial crisis in world markets over the past few weeks has been a real eye-opener, but even those of us who have seen our stock portfolios decline by 30 percent or more don’t have much to complain about. It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. A third of the world’s population lives in poverty, and 20 percent lives in extreme poverty, meaning they are always hungry.
What can you do? How about making a microloan of a $20, $50, or $100 to an entrepreneur in a poor country? Today is Blog Action Day, with blogs around the world making a concerted effort to raise awareness about global poverty and ways to fight it. What we’ve decided to do is to start a TechCrunch lending team at Kiva.org. Anyone can join.
Kiva matches entrepreneurs in poor countries with lenders in rich ones. You can choose whichever project/business you want to fund (much like DonorsChoose, another charity we encourage you to support, lets you fund specific school projects here in the U.S.). For instance, this grocery owner in Kabul needs only $50 to complete a $1,075 loan to buy inventory for a year or this furniture maker who needs $350 to complete his loan. Little actions can build up quickly through sites like Kiva.
You might also want to check out MicroPlace (another microloan site) and aGoodCause (which lets you raise money for charity while you shop). For those who want to spread the message about their own cause through their social networks, Change.org and Causecast are great places to start.
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Still Not Sure Who To Vote For? Take the Glassbooth Quiz.
By this point, most Americans have made up their minds about who they are going to vote for President come Election Day. But if you are still trying to decide, or just want to reassure yourself that you are indeed voting for the candidate who most closely reflects your views, take the Glassbooth Quiz. The site is run by a non-partisan, non-profit organization (or so it claims). You tell the site what your positions are on a range of issues, and it spits back compatibility scores for each of the Presidential candidates (including third-party candidates Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, and Bob Barr). You can try it just to make sure you really are on the same page with your preferred candidate.
Here’s how it works. First, you indicate which issues you care about the most by distributing 20 points among 16 different topics (Taxes and Budget, Science, Civil Liberties and Domestic Security, Iraq and Foreign Policy, Internet and Media, Trade and Economics, Environment and Energy, Gun Control, etc.)
Then you are asked a series of questions, whether you support or oppose policy proposals such as tax cuts for the middle class or enforcing net neutrality. Each question has a rating scale from “Strongly oppose” to “strongly support”:
Once you finish the quiz, it shows you how you match up overall to each candidate, and issue by issue. You can then drill down by issue and read the candidates’ statements on each one, with links to the sources. It is a good way to start evaluating the candidates across more than one or two hot-button issues. You might even be surprised to find out who you agree (or disagree) with the most.
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Bush’s New Copyright Czar Is Going To Do About As Much Good As His Drug Czar
Yesterday, President Bush signed into law the Pro-IP Act, which further criminalizes consumer behavior and appoints a new “Copyright Czar” to oversee enforcement of the new measures. The law triples damages in copyright infringement cases, allows the government to seize property used to usurp a company’s copyrights (hang onto those laptops), and makes each song, movie, or other piece of stolen content a separate criminal offense. Correction: this last provision thankfully was stripped out of the bill. The law is so over the top that even the Department of Justice opposed it.
Chalk this one up as another victory in the copyright wars to the reactionaries who don’t want anything to change. They think that copyright law written in the pre-digital age needs to be reinforced instead of rethought. Lawrence Lessig described what is at stake in an Op-Ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
We are in the middle of something of a war here — what some call “the copyright wars”; what the late Jack Valenti called his own “terrorist war,” where the “terrorists” are apparently our kids. . . . Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids “stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art.
Yet every war has its collateral damage. These creators are this war’s collateral damage. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society — if it thought about it for just a second — would allow to exist, legally. In a state of “war,” we can’t be lax.
The copyright wars threaten to kill new forms of creativity and free speech that are emerging on the Web. What is lacking in bills like the Pro-IP Act is a counterbalancing protection of free speech and a clearer definition of fair use. A video mashup of a 13-month-old baby dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” should be fair use, but YouTube was asked to take down that exact video anyway and it did. Because nobody wants to take these things to court or pay triple damages. Under the new law, would each view of such a video be considered a separate infringement?
If John McCain or Barack Obama really want to show their independence from corporate lobbyists then they should explain how they will help to steer copyright law into the 21st Century. (McCain, for one, can certainly appreciate the fair use argument).
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AmEx Card Members, Vote Now And Help DonorsChoose Win $1.5 Million
Are you an American Express card holder? Then your vote can help provide supplies to 100,000 school children in the U.S. American Express is giving away $2.5 million to the top charities its members vote for, and DonorsChoose right now is in third place for the top $1.5 million prize. And it is only about 1,000 votes away from second place. There are about six hours left to vote. You can vote here for DonorsChoose, or go here to see all top 25 contenders. (Only AmEx members can vote).
We are participating in this year’s DonorsChoose Blogger’s Challenge, and the top three TechCrunch donors who give at least $1,000 will receive tickets to every TechCrunch event for the next year and a chance at a pitch session with angel investor Ron Conway. (More details here). But if you are have an AmEx account, you might do more good by simply voting.
DonorsChoose is an educational charity that lets you find and fund specific teacher’s projects. If you want to fund a project directly, you can do so here through TechCrunch. For instance, for only $153 you can buy some Flip video cameras for a class of underprivileged students in Virginia. If you made money in today’s market rally, you can afford it. And it is tax deductible.
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At Google, Paddington’s Birthday Trumps Columbus Day
Columbus Day gets no respect. Be honest, how many of you are actually celebrating it? That’s what I thought.
Even Google doesn’t care (or maybe Columbus Day just isn’t PC enough). The logo on Google’s homepage today is celebrating Paddington Bear’s 50th birthday instead of a drawing of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria.
We’ve been getting some concerned e-mail asking us if we know what’s up:
Isn’t Columbus Day more important than a bear?
Does Google even like America?
Yeah, Google. Do you even like America? Everyone knows that Paddington is a Commie-terrorist bear.
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Will Verizon’s New Three-Cent Hike Kill SMS Services?
On Friday, word got out that come November 1 Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers. That hike will be on top of the 20 cents per message that Verizon subscribers already pay (even those with “unlimited” plans). Thus, in one fell swoop, Verizon is attempting to boost its SMS revenues by about 15 percent.
While it may be good for Verizon, the additional charge is not good for any service that sends out millions of SMS messages each month. The move caught a lot of Internet companies, SMS aggregators, and media companies by surprise. For instance, I asked Twitter co-founder Biz Stone what impact it would have on the micro-blogging service, which lets users keep up with every Tweet they follow via SMS, and he didn’t know:
We’re still investigating with Verizon so I don’t have a definite answer for you right now.
In August, Twitter suspended the SMS feature in the UK and other foreign countries because it would have cost the company as much as $1,000/year/user. In the U.S., apparently it has more of a flat-rate pricing.
But that might change now with Verizon—and other U.S. mobile carriers as well, if Verizon’s competitors match the price hike. How long are they going to stand by and watch Verizon capture a 15 percent margin advantage in the booming SMS business? If the new 3-cent charge becomes the norm, it would cost companies $30,000 for every million SMS messages they send out.
I use Twitter here as an example, but it is by no means alone. Thousands of Web services use SMS as a communication channel. For example, Google lets you search by SMS and also lets people set up automatic SMS alerts from Google calender and other services. Nearly every sports, stock, and weather Website (not to mention the political campaigns) lets you get SMS alerts as well. Those are the heavy volume users. But this new charge could end up hurting SMS startups such as 3Jam, 4Info, or TextMarks the most.
Now, of course, the price hike could backfire on Verizon. Google, ESPN, Twitter, and others could just suspend their SMS features for Verizon customers, and its competitors could use that disparity to their marketing advantage. But if AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile decide that they too can squeeze out an extra three cents per SMS message, they might simply pile on board.
Forget for a moment that the mobile carriers are already making a huge profit margin on the 20 cents they charge users for each message. They know they cannot charge consumers any more, but Verizon at least thinks it can turn around and charge the Web services where the SMS information is originating. If the charge spreads to other carriers, those services might die or stop using SMS as a communications channel.
(For Twitter, at least, this may not be so dire. Although Stone would not confirm, my understanding form another source is that SMS accounts for less than 10 percent of Twitter’s overall message volume. That makes sense to me. I only use Twitter’s SMS functionality to send in Tweets from my phone, not to receive the barrage of Tweets that I follow).
The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.
What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue. That is why it is better for the mobile carriers to charge consumers directly (and consistently), rather than try to sneak around and get an extra three cents per message from the Web content companies.
(Photo by Ti.mo).
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During Tough Times, The Echo Chamber Can Be Your Best Friend
We are witnessing either an epic financial meltdown or a long overdue resetting of existing business practices and the hollow markets they create. Or, perhaps we’re experiencing both of these phenomena. Either way, it has the nation gripped with fear, uncertainty, and an unsettling eruption of questionable advice confusing everyone, everywhere.
While the floor is crumbling for many industries much in the same way it did for Silicon Valley during the dotbomb years, the sky isn’t necessarily falling on the startup industry – at least not for those with marketable technology or products, dedicated and capable teams, an executable business plan, and access to the resources necessary to help it reach users and customers.
For those startups that are building and marketing something of value for consumers or businesses, there is much work to do. While there is always a need to attract mainstream users, this isn’t the time to stretch or over-commit resources to hit everyone all at once. Branding is an expensive proposition, one that requires time, capital, diligence, dedicated teams, enthusiastic customers, and patience. As counter intuitive as it may seem, this is exactly the right time to market into the echo chamber to earn the support of influentials who will create significant, concentrated brand visibility and momentum to carry you forward.
Your business can grow with the groundswell and doesn’t necessarily require the instant adoption by the masses in order to succeed in the short term.
Usually, when the economy slides, the first natural reaction is to cut expenses, conserve cash, and hunker-down to weather the storm. All good advice. But don’t forget also that this could be your time to shine, albeit, in a strategic and intelligent way.
Great entrepreneurs build value and market-share in down markets. They go to work seven days a week and the(y) breakout when other folks check out. — Jason Calacanis
Now’s the time to get your head in the game and focus on what it is you do, and go do it better than anyone else. You’re either on the field or you’re on the sidelines.
Any company that intentionally pulls itself from the radar screen of their customers will be absent from customer decisions and referrals. In the process, you create a frictionless opportunity for your competitors to swoop in and fill the void.
There are always customers making decisions, so make sure that you’re part of the equation and process, wherever they go for information and insight.
Influence and adoption historically have migrated from the edge to the center. Or using a more common example, customers and word-of-mouth referrals travel from left to right along a bell curve that starts with Innovators and Early Adopters, peaks with the Early Majority and the Late Majority, and finally permeates with reaction from Laggards.
If you dissect the art and science of technology marketing using a car as a simple metaphor, your product serves as the chassis, your cash as the fuel, Social Media, Interactive/Web, Sales, SEO, and PR as the accelerator, marketing strategy and execution as the gears, RPMs as a market indicator for listening and responding, the speedometer to convey inertia, and you, as founding executive, sitting in the driver’s seat, steering and controlling the entire operation.
Marketing to the echo chamber, believe it or not, is how you get that car rolling, starting everything in first gear. Appealing to those who can help spark word of mouth is how you can accelerate, gain enough speed to shift into second, and subsequent higher gears, and attract new users and evangelists along the way, growing in distance and reach at every turn. It is the echo chamber that can help you efficiently gain velocity in order to progressively reach greater audiences and command additional financing and also revenue in the process. With its support and assistance, it is almost like starting with a colossal push.
You have to start by engaging those who’ll get it, and in turn, share it with their peers. It’s an ongoing process that strengthens with each cycle.
Hopefully you are building your business in a way that is independent of the stock market.
— Kevin Ryan
The world doesn’t flock to new things en masse. It takes a focused and progressive strategy that evolves and matures over time. In a down economy, this is non-negotiable.
Digg and Twitter are among some of the best examples of how alpha users can help promote a company or service by embracing these new solutions and religiously demonstrating why they are pervasive and useful. And, emphatic users also contribute to the community building process, assisting in the translation of the value proposition for different markets as well as enticing and compelling their peers to join them, which offsets and relieves the company from carrying the bulk of the responsibility for promotion and guerilla marketing.
But, where are Digg and Twitter in respect to the adoption cycle? They’re not as far along as you think judging by the buzz and permeation of your social graph. These companies still have oceans to swim until they become household brands. But, that’s OK. They’re building a business, cultivating legions of dedicated user communities, evolving and improving their product, and still conserving cash. Remember, it took brands such as eBay, Youtube, Google, and Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of enthusiasts and partners to achieve saturation – and many would argue that there’s still much work to be done.
I would bet on any company that earned the support of innovators and early adopters and took the time to listen to feedback in order to iterate based on real world needs, preferences, pains, and new ideas.
Without influence, you’re going to spend precious resources, more than you can afford, convincing people that they should pay attention. Peer-to-peer marketing is priceless and still your best bet for having a shot, and more importantly, making a long-term impact.
But you first need a spark, something to start that avalanche that grows as it races downhill.
The echo chamber is bigger than we think or give it credit for. In fact, think of the echo chamber as its own bell curve. Most of the blogs and users that naturally come to mind, may reside on the left side, leaving a wide array of technology enthusiasts to uncover and pursue.
Innovators and early adopters are global citizens and do not solely reside in Silicon Valley. Figure out who your market is today, tomorrow, next month, and set goals for user acquisition so that you can tweak your product and tailor your messages to those very people, as they’ll uniquely connect to your story, and also share it differently among their peers, as it traverses across the bell curve.
Remember, reporters, bloggers and online tastemakers (aka trendsetters) who spotlight innovation can send tens of thousands of new and loyal users to you almost instantly. I’m not just referring to unique visits of those who sign up, test things out, and then leave to try the next shiny service. When done right, the echo chamber can generate real world interest and support. It is these very users who tell you everything about what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve. These same individuals and networks also augment and complement your marketing efforts by legitimizing you’re products, associating credibility and providing pseudo endorsements, and in turn, giving you unprecedented access to their invaluable and highly connected networks of early adopter friends.
This is the time to focus on user acquisition. This is edgework. Everything starts with an intimate understanding of the markets you’re trying to reach and an even deeper connection to the peers, voices, and other channels that influence them. Most of you are not marketing iPhones, gaming consoles, premium spirits, or new music artists. At the very least, you are redefining how people communicate, collaborate, connect, and ultimately work.
There’s a prevailing necessity to educate your markets and introduce not just new products and services, but also change the daily routines of everyday people.
Therefore the goal to race from zero to 60 and hit mass penetration immediately is not necessarily the primary goal. If we look at business development and communications as a series of strategic stages, we realize that there are focused activities that we must pursue and smaller, reachable voices we must reach and convince to help us carry and adapt our story from stage to stage – each time, addressing the needs and pain points of the individual, respective groups.
Of course, as you learn, internalize feedback, change, adapt, and engage with your markets, the foundation for your business solidifies and begins to afford and beget expansion. It is at this point in time, when you can continue to expand your focus and reach to attract and inspire users residing outside of the echo chamber.
Nothing beats a killer product idea and an impressive, objective, and focused team to carry it forward. Expectations count and will determine how you channel information and progress. Think too big and you’ll miss your target and burn through resources before you can ever earn any significant market traction. Aim too low and the market will pass you by.
In this volatile economic climate, the echo chamber can be your direct connection to success, or at the very least, help to kickstart market adoption of your products. It is a global incubator designed to help you grow, gain momentum, and ultimately propel your business across the bell curve to appeal to and attract a wider, active base of customers.
We live in interesting times and it’s up to us, and only us, to define our future.
(Photo by Wetwebworks).
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Real World Got You Down? IBM Invites You To A Virtual Forbidden City.
Can’t afford a ticket to China to go visit the Forbidden City? Well, now all you need is your computer. IBM, which is a big believer in virtual worlds, and China’s Palace Museum have created an exact replica of the 178-acre Forbidden City. After working meticulously for three years to recreate every building and thousands of major artifacts, the virtual Forbidden City is now available for download (for Windows, Mac, or Linux). It’s free, although, I warn you the Mac version, at least, is a massive 275MB file.
Once inside, you can choose an avatar, dress him or her up in Qing Dynasty-era robes, take virtual tours, play Go with computer-controlled characters, call up maps, explore buildings and objects that allow you to click for deeper information. The virtual world was built on a gaming platform from Garage Games called Torque. ( I guess OpenSim wasn’t good enough. No word on whether it will be interoperable with Second Life)
So if you are looking for somewhere to weather out the current financial storm, but don’t have any money to actually go anywhere, you can spend hours roaming IBM’s virtual Forbidden City.
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As the Markets Melt, Wikinvest Wire Launches To Offer Advice From Financial Blogs
The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That’s the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate.
Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply.
The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as “Google (GOOG),” “bailout,” or “credit default swaps”). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods.
Nevertheless, Wikinvest co-founder Parker Conrad positions Wikinvest Wire as really taking on SeekingAlpha, an investing news site that republishes posts from select blogs and media outlets (including TechCrunch). Conrad argues:
This launch puts us directly in competition with a larger site—SeekingAlpha.com—in that both SeekingAlpha and the Wire are syndication platforms for investing bloggers. However, there are some important distinctions:
SeekingAlpha requires a blogger to give up their content to SeekingAlpha. The bloggers’ articles are published on SeekingAlpha, and SeekingAlpha distributes links to content on their site to their partners, such as Yahoo Finance. Investing bloggers use SeekingAlpha, grudgingly, because it increases their traffic marginally. But they also hate SeekingAlpha—because 99% of the traffic to their posts actually goes to SeekingAlpha. Selling ads against the bloggers’ content is, after all, SeekingAlpha’s business model. But you can see why that might chafe . . .
Wikinvest, however, does not require bloggers to host their content on our site—and all links, from media partners, wikinvest.com, and other bloggers, go directly to the blogger’s own site. What we get out of it are links back to Wikinvest which are included in the Wire.
There’s also another big difference Conrad forgot to mention. SeekingAlpha is an actual site where readers can go and see all of the posts it hand-picks in one place. There is no one place you can go to see all the posts included in the Wikinvest Wire. The links are generated algorithmically and distributed piecemeal all over the Web. There is not even an RSS feed that pulls all the 100 financial blogs that make up the Wikinvest Wire together. (Although, you can get an RSS feed for any Wikinvest topic page, which will include Wikinvest Wire posts for that topic).
All of this is by design, as Conrad explains above, to generate more traffic for the participating blogs. But it’s not really a wire unless there is one place you can go to see all the posts popping up as they go live. So I’m not sure SeekingAlpha has too much to worry about.
Nevertheless, the addition of relevant financial blog posts to each page on Wikinvest should help to make it an even more useful site than it is today. If you are trying to figure out what to do with your stock portfolio, it is worth checking out for the comprehensiveness of the data and collection of arguments from both bulls and bears on each stock. They also have great charts that anyone can annotate (I’ve embedded one below).
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Another Way To Follow The Campaign: Dipity’s Election Center Timelines
Want to follow every Tweet, blog post, YouTube video and Flickr photo put out by the Obama or McCain camps? Now you can follow the campaigns in a handy Dipity Election Center timeline. Using its latest Dipity 2.0 timeline mashup, the Election Center places each entry on a timeline that you can scroll through. Click on an entry, and a box opens to show you more detailed information. You can also leave a comment.
Each timeline can be embedded as a widget anywhere on the Web. And you can see everyone’s comments from any widget. The idea is that Obama supporters will put the Obama widget on their MySpace page or blog and that McCain supporters will do the same on theirs. I’ve embedded both widgets below. You can see by the larger number of entries for the Obama campaign that it is making better use of social media to get its message out. (At least that was the case when I looked at the timelines—see screenshot).
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Microsoft Office Labs Releases “Touchless” Multi-Touch Software As An Open-Source SDK
No, Microsoft is not getting into the car-wash business. But it is releasing “Touchless,” multitouch software from Microsoft Office Labs that uses a regular Web camera and everyday objects as input. You can think of this as a low-end version of its Touchwall technology, which uses more precise lasers to detect movement and objects. The software developer kit is available now under an open-source Microsoft Public License. The SDK only works on Windows (what did you expect?).
Like Microsoft Surface and Touchwall, the Touchless software makes it possible to create applications that turn hand gestures and physical objects into an input device like a mouse. Touchless detects both the size and location of “color markers” (which can be fingers, toys, pens, M&Ms) as they move through space. Microsoft engineer Mike Wasserman s Ian Sands and Chris Pratley have created four demos to showcase the technology:
- Snake - where you control a snake with a marker.
- Defender - up to 4 player version of a pong-like game.
- Map - where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers.
- Draw - the marker is used to guess what…. draw!
Try it out. Free TechCrunch T-shirt to whoever creates the coolest Touchless app and uploads a video in comments.
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Forget The Blackberry “Application Center.” The BerryStore Will Have Better Apps.
As Research in Motion prepares to open its Blackberry Application Center to answer the iPhone’s App Store, an unaffiliated startup called the BerryStore has already launched a competing app store for Blackberry Apps. What makes it better than the official BlackBerry App Center (besides the name), is that apps in the BerryStore work across both old and new BlackBerries alike (not just the upcoming BlackBerry Storm), and across carriers. The BlackBerry App center, in contrast, is designed to be a carrier-specific store, with different apps for different carriers.
AYou can download the BerryStore as an app itself by visiting www.berrystore.com on your BlackBerry. (The App Center will require users to download apps through their Blackberry browsers, which is not the best experience). Already there are about 40 apps in the store, ranging from Loopt, 3Jam, and TwitterBerry to Obopay, Citysense, and Google Mobile. All of them are currently free, although the company plans on offering paid apps in the future. Developers can get more details about how to submit apps or the BerryStore here.
Below is a list of each app currently in the BerryStore with a short description:
Books & Reference
NeoReader: Turns your Blackberry into a barcode scanner.
Blackberry Wiki: Wikipedia reader.
Beyond411: Yellow pages, maps, and directions.
MobipocketReader: Mobile e-reader.
Business & Finance
Obopay: P2P payments.
Bank of America: Manage your dwindling bank account.
NyTimes DealBook: A bookmark icon to the popular blog.
E-Trade Mobile Pro: Manage your dwindling stock portfolio.
Lifestyle
Google Mobile: Search, Maps, Gmail.
Opera: Opera Mini Web browser.
Zumobi:Mobile widgets.
Google Mail: As in Gmail.
Poynt: Local search.
Maufait InstaFind: Al-in-one 411, flight tracker, movie showtimes, stock quotes, weather, news.
Puretracks:Mobile music store.
Tellme: Voice-enabled GPS info.
reQall: Voice-to-text recorder, to-do list, and idea manager.
Nobex Radio Companion: Shows you the name of the songs playing on the radio.
News & Weather
Viigo: News, sports, entertainment, weather, stock and traffic alerts.
New York Times: Bookmark icon.
ABC News: Bookmark icon.
The Washington Post: Bookmark icon.
CNBC Mobile: Bookmark icon.
USA Today: Bookmark icon.
Slate: Bookmark icon.
PinStack.com: Forums
Social Networking
TwitterBerry: Mobile Twitter client that avoids SMS charges.
3jam: Group text messages.
eBuddy: Instant messaging app
Dexrex: Archives your text messages.
Pinger: Voice IM.
Sports
Sports Illustrated: Bookmark icon.
ESPN Mobile: Bookmark icon.
Travel & Navigation
Google Maps: What it sounds like.
GPSed: Map your GPS tracks, save them, and share them. Also geotags your photos.
Citysense: Live hotspot tracking.
WorldMate Live: A personal digital assistant for travelers
Utilities
Box.net: Access and share files on your BB.
AutoLock: Locks the keyboard.
MidpSSH: Connect to remote servers.
MiniMoni: Monitor IP traffic.
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Tech Stocks Take It On The Chin As Market Continues To Freefall
It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down.
Fears of a credit freeze are growing as the contagion spread to banks in Europe. The Fed is already flooding the market with more cash through new powers it was granted in the bailout package. All of this makes you wonder if A) the U.S. government acted fast enough and B) whether the bailout package is going to end up doing any good.
As far as tech stocks are concerned, already as I write this, there seems to be somewhat of a rally going on in some of these stocks (particularly Google) from the lows where they opened. But if the economy falters, tech stocks won’t be a safe haven for investors, even if they are cash-rich and not as exposed to the credit debacle as companies in other sectors. The markets always tend to overreact to systemic risk because nobody knows how far the problems are going to spread. What we are seeing is panic in the face of the unknown. It reminds me of the market panic after 9/11. Investors whop loaded up on tech stocks then ended up making a lot of money.
Does this signal a buying opportunity, or are investors better off running for the hills? Who is buying (or selling) what out there? Tell us in comments.
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Bad Karma At contentSutra. Site Sputters After Being Bought By The Guardian.
Only three months after the British newspaper publisher The Guardian Group bought Rafat Ali’s ContentNext Media and his collection of blogs for a reported $30 million, one of those blogs is sputtering badly. The blog in question is contentSutra, the Indian counterpart to its bigger and better known brother, paidContent (both cover the business of digital media). Until recently, contentSutra was ContentNext’s second biggest blog, even beating out mocoNews.
But if you look at it now, traffic has dropped off a cliff. Posts are sporadic, and mostly consist of news roundups or the occasional post from the editors at paidContent. ContentNext and the Guardian are currently in talks with media companies in India for possible syndication and cross-promotion deals. Rumors are going around that ContentNext has been in talks with HT Media (publisher of the Hindustan Times), 9.9 Media, and others. We also received an unconfirmed tip that the Guardian is trying to unload contentSutra all together, but Rafat Ali says that is not true.
In any event, the site is not doing as well as it once did. The editor who built up contentSutra for two years, Nikhil Pahwa, left at the end of May, and launched his own competing blog, Medianama, a month later on June 27. Pahwa didn’t have any equity in ContentNext and was frustrated by the lack of a plan to take it to the next level. The Guardian deal was announced two weeks after he launched Medianama. Pahwa tells me:
About the Guardian deal: I found out about the deal, like everyone else, on the day that it was announced. All I knew before that is that ContentNext was raising another round of VC funding. The interest in the market is evident from the fact that contentSutra was number two among the ContentNext properties in terms of traffic at one point in time.
One of the reasons (but obviously not the main driver) for the deal was the international exposure that contentSutra would provide. In an interview on paidContent, Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall explained the appeal of ContentNext’s Indian media property:
International plans: The common interests the companies have in UK, US and India are a major part of the fit. McCall: “India is an emerging market and doing incredibly well, I should think, and there are great opportunities there … I think we could help each other in India because we’ve been looking at that market long and hard.”
After Pahwa left, Ali started looking for a new editor for contentSutra. He is still looking. Meanwhile, Medianama is putting out more posts a day (and better ones) on the Indian digital media scene than contentSutra. A blog is only as good as its writers.
That’s the thing about blogs. They are incredible efficient from a labor standpoint. You can launch a media property covering an entire sub-continent with one editor. The flip side is that when you build a brand or sub-brand around one person, that brand takes a hit when that person walks out the door. (This is an issue all blogs have to deal with, and is why giving out equity to writers and editors is a good idea).
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If Sales Of Halloween Masks Could Predict The Election, Obama Would Be President
Everyone has their favorite way to predict who will win the Presidential election. Amazon likes to keep track of Halloween mask sales. Supporters of either candidate can buy rubber masks of each to wear for Halloween. So far, 57 percent of the masks Amazon has sold have been Obama masks, versus 43 percent for McCain masks.
The weird thing is that is right around the same number that McCain is getting in the latest tracking polls (Obama is tracking closer to 50 percent support). If you want some real helpful stats and links, check out Google Director of Research Peter Norvig’s Presidential Election 2008 FAQ page. He’s got links to all the latest polls, election prediction markets, truth scorecards, and studies measuring media bias.
Or you can just buy a mask. I’m not sure if they’ll let you in the voting booth with that, though.
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The Crunchie: It’s Not Just An Award, It’s A Weapon
When we commissioned the statuettes for the Crunchies Awards last year, we hoped to create something a little more memorable than the typical plastic tombstone. We opted for a plastic monkey holding a bone aloft instead. While it does have a certain menacing quality to it, we never expected anyone to turn it into weapon.
But now you can find “The Crunchie” in the online game Duels. Our award has been re-stylized as a deadly mace with a power rating of 631 (which is massive, a run-of-the-mill mace has a power rating of 50 or less). There appears to be only one, and it is owned by a player named Loki (aka Andrew Busey, CEO of Challenge Games, the maker of Duel). You don’t want to mess with him. He’s got a Crunchie.
Here’s the description of the Crunchie on its dedicated Duels weapons page:
This stylized mace was crafted to capture a snapshot of history. The rise of tools, followed quickly by an escalation in both productivity and violence, heralded the dawn of a new age. The foundation of what became civilization, tools quickly became weapons. This mace memorializes the quest for dominance that transition brought. Raw competition and a battle to the top are captured in the simple bone weapon used by the savage. Today the competition may be more civilized, but it can still be just as brutal.
That sentiment sounds familiar. Here’s our description of why we went with the original design for the award:
The inspiration comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie a tribe of prehistoric ape-men interact with a black monolith that appears near them. The monolith inspires one of them to create the first use of technology - a bone used as a tool and a weapon. The video clip of the segment is in our original post on the award.
We are honoring startups that have innovated in technology; thus, we feel the award is symbolic culturally and appropriate. The additional flourishes, such as the baseball cap and jersey, were the idea of the artist to modernize the setting. And the ape is beating on old technology with his bone - a symbol of the disruptive nature of the technology world, where young startups often feast on their older, slower siblings.
Stay tuned for details about next year’s Crunchies Awards soon.
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It’s Going To Be A Grinch Christmas: Slowdown Forecast For Online Holiday Sales
With credit tightening and consumer confidence shaky, you know this is going to be a tough year for holiday sales. A forecast that came out this morning from Lehman Brothers (now Barclays Capital), puts Internet sales over the upcoming holiday season growing at just 8 percent, compared to 19 percent growth last year (and 26 percent in 2006). That’s still better than the one percent growth in holiday ales expected at physical department stores, but the fourth quarter is make-or-break for many e-commerce sites and the slowdown in growth is not going to help.
A slowdown in demand will also hurt sites that depend on advertising, including Google (search in the fourth quarter is “largely driven by retail,” says the Barclays report. It is no wonder that other analysts are also beginning to cut back their expectations for Internet advertising revenues overall.
Despite the trimmed forecasts, the Internet remains the most likely sector to see the strongest growth in both retail sales and advertising. Just don’t get your hopes up too high.
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What’s Your Tweet Worth? Um, . . . Nothing.
A month ago, I wrote about a company called TwittAd that lets you auction off ads on your Twitter page. Now, the company is sponsoring WhatsYourTweetWorth?, a vanity site where you enter your Twitter name, and it tells you how much your Tweets are worth based on how many followers you have. (Try it later, the site is down—probably being overwhelmed by people who are already Twittering about it). Before it went down, it said that TechCrunch, which has 26,361 followers, is worth $503 per month. Except that, it isn’t.
As I noted in my post on TwittAd:
The problem with placing ads on your Twitter page, though, is that ultimately you may just be advertising to yourself. I rarely go to the Twitter pages of people I follow. Their Tweets appear on my Twitter page (and my FriendFeed page, and my Thwirl client, and my Twinkle app on my iPhone). That’s why I follow people, so I can get their Tweets pushed to me. The only way ads are going to work on Twitter is if they are blended into the message stream and sent out as Tweets. But that would be annoying.
I’m sure that’s not going to stop everyone from a Twitter account checking ou thow much they are worth. Here’s a money-making idea TwittAd: Forget about trying to sell ads on Twitter pages, and put ads on WhatsYourTweetWorth instead. (Assuming they can get it to work again).
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