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How I Think The iPhone 4 Antenna Press Conference Is Going To Play Out
Perhaps you heard, Apple is having a little press conference on Friday . The reason? Officially, it’s about the iPhone 4. That’s all they’ll say. But everyone knows the slightly more detailed reason: the iPhone 4′s antenna . The only details Apple is giving out about the event is that it’s going to take place on their campus on Friday morning at 10 AM PT. But talking to some other people who got calls from Apple as well about the event may hold some clues as to what we can expect. First and foremost, the whole thing is bizarre. Apple has announced events with very little notification before, but never this little notification. The event is Friday morning and they notified people on Wednesday evening (or night for those people on the east coast). This essentially gives people one day notice. And they’re calling people across the U.S. about it, and asking if they can make it. For some, this means last-minute cross country flights. Obviously, Apple isn’t going to be paying for those, so it’s not clear how many people from outside the Bay Area are going to attend. And many are unsure if they should attend because Apple is being so vague about what they’ll be talking about. But you have to imagine if it’s a last-second press conference, it has to be pretty major, right? Not necessarily. My sense is that the main idea behind this event is to get a bunch of big publications and other key Apple influencers into a room to go over the iPhone 4 antenna issue once and for all. I have little doubt that Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself will be leading this discussion, with other Apple executives talking as well. I also suspect we may see some antenna and wireless industry experts to offer their insights as well. The purpose of such a gathering would be to cut off the backlash against the iPhone 4 at the knees. The Consumer Reports flip-flop would seem to be the major catalyst here. And regardless of what you think of Consumer Reports, Apple knows that it is a brand many average consumers trust. In fact, Apple has had no problem citing it before when they rate the iPhone favorably (incidentally, the iPhone 4 is Consumer Reports’ highest-rated smartphone , despite the non-recommendation). Still, the Consumer Reports story is just one thing. More troubling to Apple has to be the cascade effect it has had on the media. CNN is talking about it, MSNBC is talking about it , local news is talking about it — even David Letterman is talking about it . The situation has gotten out of control in a way the tightly-controlled Apple cannot find comfortable at all. So that’s what I believe this event is about. A way to pivot the message back to what Apple perceives to be the facts. Apple will undoubtedly acknowledge that holding the iPhone 4 does affect the signal . But they’ll note once again that this is true of all cellphones. And perhaps some experts will chime in to show some results to prove this to be the case. They’ll also undoubtedly point out how the iPhone 4 actually has the best antenna Apple has ever produced. They’ll probably have results to back this up as well. The focus will be on the facts that Apple has studies to prove. And the idea behind all of this is to drill it into our heads that the antenna issue is being blown out of proportion . That it’s an easy headline about a hot product. And Apple’s tactic may just work. Because it’s a lot harder to blindly write about one side of a topic when the other side has very directly addressed and refuted the issues with you. Apple will also likely talk about the software fix that is currently testing (iOS 4.1) which they say will help the issue as well. Our early tests show iOS 4.1 doesn’t fix the antenna issue at all (it is, after all, a hardware issue). But it does alter the bar indicators to make them more accurately reflect your actual signal, which is what Apple said it would do. Earlier tonight, a MacRumors forum poster laid out a similar scenario about how this event may play out. The difference is that he believes Apple will give out $50 gift cards that iPhone 4 purchasers can use to buy iPhone bumpers (cases) if they wish. I’m not sure how likely that is. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple does announce a way to specifically give away these bumpers (which are normally $29) to people who buy (or have bought) the iPhone 4. Another thing the forum post didn’t really hit on was the importance of who is invited to this event. As I said, Apple seems to be focusing on key influencers in the tech media. My belief is that Apple is hoping that by aiming at the top, the message will trickle down and overwhelm the Consumer Reports fall-out. Again, whether you agree with it or not, it seems like a pretty good strategy. Of course, all of that is just speculation. With this little amount of time before the event, it’s unlikely that anything will leak out before it happens. But there is always the possibility of one giant curveball. While I still find it hard to believe that Apple is thinking about an iPhone 4 recall at this point, the possibility is interesting for this Friday event. After all, it makes more sense to issue a recall in a controlled manner (where journalists can digest the news and ask questions), rather than to issue a statement about it and have everyone scream bloody murder. Again, I don’t think that is going to happen, but it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility if say, Apple is willing to acknowledge that there are at least some defective iPhone 4 antennas. The thing that’s a bit curious about this press conference is that Apple has already set a precedent by issuing a statement about the antenna issue on July 2. If they’re now doing a full press conference, surely their announcement must be more significant, right? But again, that statement was before Consumer Reports changed its mind and decided you shouldn’t buy the iPhone 4 due to the antenna issue. And that report has led us to where we are now. To combat that, Apple may feel the time is right to pull out their not-so-secret weapon: Steve Jobs. On a stage. Talking . [photo: flickr/ acaben ] CrunchBase Information Apple iPhone 4 Information provided by CrunchBase
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How I Think The iPhone 4 Antenna Press Conference Is Going To Play Out
Cavs Owner Dan Gilbert Unveils The New-Look TechCrunch!
When Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert heard that we were working on a redesign of TechCrunch, he decided to give it a go with his own sense of style. After inviting several other world-class designers to our headquarters in SF we decided to go with his vision. Voila! Say hello to the new-look TechCrunch . Truth be told, we felt a bit bad for Gilbert. He’s had a rough 24 hours. Yesterday, at a nationally televised press conference, he found out his star player, LeBron James, was booking it to Miami to play with D-Wade and Chris Bosh — a move that left Gilbert clearly pissed off . But we’re here to offer him a consolation prize. We now have a version of TechCrunch in his favorite font , Comic Sans! Yes, okay, Techmeme did it first , but we wanted to show our support as well. It seems that the web can’t get enough of Comic Sans. Or at least, get enough of taking shots at the hideous font. Over 12 hours after we first wrote about it , the font is still a top trending topic on Twitter. And yes, still ahead of even “LeBron James.” Meanwhile, our post has gotten some massive mainstream media love with CNN , The Wall Street Journal , NPR , and others all weighing in on the hot topic. In fact, the CNN story on the faux pas was even the most popular story on the entire site earlier today. Joked Twitter user Audrey Watter earlier , “ perhaps if BP had issued press statements in Comic Sans, we’d still be talking about the oil spill, eh? “ So this is our thank you to you, Dan Gilbert. Thank you for writing your rant in a font that cannot be ignored. And we’re sorry about the LeBron thing. P.S. Every page on TechCrunch will now work in Comic Sans if you simply append “?lebronified” to the end of the URL. Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, try “?LEBRONIFIED”.
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Cavs Owner Dan Gilbert Unveils The New-Look TechCrunch!
We Need More Opinion In News, Not Less
I’m dismayed to see journalists continue to be punished, even fired, for expressing their opinions on the things they cover. Yesterday CNN terminated Octavia Nasr over a tweet praising a late Hezbollah leader. Last month Helen Thomas was forced to resign over statements about Israel. Last year the Washington Post put restraints on journalists from expressing opinions on social networks “ that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.” The list goes on. I think journalists should have the right to express their opinions on the topics they cover. More importantly, I think readers have a right to know what those opinions are. Frankly, I’d like to know sooner rather than later just how insane some of these people at CNN and Fox News are. To stop them from giving me that information is just another way to lie to me. A couple of years ago I was attending a dinner in New York, sitting next to a very well known journalist covering big national news, particularly political news. He’d been in the business a long time – since the early 70s – and we had a fascinating conversation about news gathering and creation, and how technology is changing the industry. At one point I asked him offhand what he thought of President Bush as a leader. He got very serious and told me he wouldn’t comment. Curious, I asked him what political party he supported. Again, he wouldn’t respond. He said it was important for him to keep that a secret so that it would not be seen as a bias in his coverage. Oh, that sparked a conversation. He did admit that he did support some politicians and not others and that he tended to vote for a single political party. He just wouldn’t state any names. And this is where I became and remain seriously confused. As a trained journalist he saw his job as reporting the news in a balanced and unbiased way. To tell me, or anyone, his political leanings could make people see his content differently, he said. My point to him was that it was necessary for people to know his political biases in order to understand his content in context. I believe it is quite impossible to not bake your bias into your content. He disagreed and said that the core of his training was to do just that. Of course, his political bias was fairly evident to me, he clearly hated Bush with a passion. But I couldn’t make him say it. But he’s wrong. An added adjective here, an added paragraph there, just the right quote from a source and voilà, you’ve got yourself an opinion piece masked as a straight up unbiased piece of reporting. I’ve witnessed this first hand more times than I can remember, which is why I don’t tend to do interviews with journalists I don’t know and trust. One slip of the tongue and that’s all they focus on, even if it’s out of context. There’s little care for the overall message, just the sound bites that give the journalist the hook they need. See this article from last year where I argue that Process Journalism isn’t just not a bad thing, it’s the proper way to develop stories. I say near the end I always shudder when journalists say “don’t say something, get a source to say it and then quote them.” It leads to really awful stuff. Pretending that you’re writing one story when you’re really writing another, and then twisting what your sources tell you to fit whatever it is that your editor told you to write isn’t ethical journalism. It may check all the boxes that were laid out for you in journalism school, but it isn’t anything other than op-ed with nothing real to back it up. Think it’s crazy to say that top journalists go out and hunt down the quotes they need to tell the story they want to tell? Well Tim O’Reilly says it happened this week: Frustrated by flamebait NY reporting in Microsoft story I was rather dismayed to find words put into my mouth in Ashee Vance’s story http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/technology/05soft.html?pagewanted=all The author wrote an opinion piece, but wrote it as if he were reporting comments I’d made. We take a lot of criticism at TechCrunch for writing stories that are clearly biased. That’s despite the fact that we tend to state our bias right up front, sometimes in the damn title . That’s not journalism, people say. Well, that’s fine with me. But what you can’t accuse us of is being dishonest to our readers. We call things like we see them. We never fudge facts or make things up. We don’t go out and manufacture quotes to support the story we want to write, we just write the story. And other people can write different stories with different opinions. And you, the reader, can go read all of them and then maybe write your own blog post with a whole new opinion. Everyone has a printing press these days, and ink is free. That has changed the world, and journalism needs to change with it. The fact is it’s impossible for a human being to write something that isn’t subjective. We aren’t robots, we’re human. At the moment you even chose the topic of your content you’ve made a subjective choice to spend time on that instead of something else. And everything flows from there. Read that entire Microsoft post that Tim O’Reilly links to carefully and you’ll see the bias screaming out from the page. Until I was actually creating news this wasn’t so obvious to me. Now I can read any news piece and tell you the subtle or not so subtle bias of the author in a heartbeat. All this bullshit about objectivity in journalism is just a trick journalists use to try to gain credibility, and the public eats it up. I’ve got a whole new post, or maybe even a book, to write about why I think that is. Here’s hoping we’ll start to get those deep, dark opinions out in the open for everyone to see.
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We Need More Opinion In News, Not Less
Citizen Journalism Platform Allvoices Growing Fast Thanks To Global Expansion
We’ve written about Allvoices, a citizen journalism platform that is seeing fast growth internationally. In fact, the site, which was launched in 2008, is even approaching CNN’s iReport in terms of worldwide traffic. According to comScore’s May data, Allvoices saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide compared to 3.6 million unique visitors for CNN’s iReport. But in the U.S., CNN still has a huge market share of traffic. For the same time period, comScore reports 3.3 million unique visitors for iReport, with Allvoices only seeing 730,000 visitors in the U.S. in May. According to Quantcast, Allvoices saw 6.5 million unique monthly visitors in May. The site has also grown its registered number of citizen journalists to 375,000 users from 275,000 in January. CNN has just under 500,000 registered “iReporters.” Allvoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site’s proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high. While CNN appears to have a foothold in the U.S. for citizen reporters and traffic for iReport, Allvoices seems to be thriving internationally. It is impressive that a bootstrapped startup is successfully competing with large media corporations like CNN. Over the past few months, Allvoices has been ramping up its the presence of its platform internationally, launching global news desks in 30 different cities around the world, where both professional and citizen journalists will provide regular in-country reports from the ground. This is clearly one of the reasons for the site’s continued growth over the past few months. The company has also recruited talent to help further growth. Allvoices recently brought on Ask.com’s co-founder David Warthen as the startup’s Chief Technology Officer. Interestingly, Allvoices also includes a syndication program that allows media companies and image buyers to license images and content from the platform. The site also offers incentive programs health reporter, including health care for citizen reporters. CrunchBase Information Allvoices Information provided by CrunchBase ·
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Citizen Journalism Platform Allvoices Growing Fast Thanks To Global Expansion
Facebook Disabled The Massively Popular Boycott BP Page “In Error”
This morning, there was some ruckus on the Web when Facebook seemingly flat out deleted the Boycott BP page , which has amassed some 734,000 ‘fans’ on the social network so far. The message spread quickly, with posts going up on CNN’s citizen journalism project iReport and Desmond Perkins , who set up the Boycott BP page, alleging that Facebook singled him and members of his family out to silence him on the site via his own website and Twitter account. Perkins promptly set up a new Facebook page , which grew to just south of 10,000 users in half a day. About 9 hours after its removal, Facebook reinstated the page, which is used by a vocal group of users to vent their feelings and share information and opinions regarding the oil spill and the way BP is handling (or rather, not handling) the tragic situation. Following multiple reports on the Web about the mysterious apparent removal of the page and its return, we contacted Facebook to learn what happened exactly. Moments ago, the company provided us with an official statement on the matter, which remains quite vague but at least acknowledges there was no malicious intent involved, let alone a conscious decision by someone at Facebook to shut the page down: “The admin profile of the Boycott BP Page was disabled by our automated systems therefore removing all the content that had been created by the profile. After a manual review we determined the profile was removed in error and it has now been restored along with the Page.” Asked what triggered the automated systems to flag said profile in the first place, Facebook declined to go into detail because it fears people knowing about how their systems work will “weaken their effectiveness”. Either way, Perkins and the 734,000+ who are keen on showing their dislike for BP on Facebook can rest assured they were not intentionally marked for silencing. It was a systems failure – rather ironic of course considering the reason why this page was set up in the first place. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
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Facebook Disabled The Massively Popular Boycott BP Page “In Error”
Finance Sites Turn To StockTwits For Curated Stock Tweets
Both CNN Money and MarketWatch have added curated stock and finance tweets to their sites. But they aren’t just showing unfiltered tweets based on a query or hash tag – instead they’ve turned to StockTwits , presumably for more relevant data. Messages only show up on StockTwits if you add a “$” before a stock symbol, and the company also carefully moderates messages and blocks users who tend to spam. The result is a fairly clear, mess-free stream of rumors and trade information that some obsessed trader types may somehow find useful. At the very least it’s entertaining to read things like “@bradybrown Dammit… I go to a meeting and $AAPL falls off a cliff!!! WTH???” CNN has added a StockTwits widget to each stock summary page ( example ). MarketWatch is using the StockTwits trending tickers widget , which shows hot stocks (as in, what everyone’s talking about, not necessarily what’s moving up or down in price). CrunchBase Information StockTwits Information provided by CrunchBase
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Finance Sites Turn To StockTwits For Curated Stock Tweets
Huffington Post Buys Adaptive Semantics To Keep Up With 100,000 Comments A Day
The Huffington Post has acquired its first company in a small cash deal, and it is not another blog or media site, but a pure technology startup called Adaptive Semantics . The two-person startup provides a semantic analysis engine (aka JuLiA) already used by the Huffington Post to help moderate the 100,000 comments published on the blog every day. Prior to the acquisition, the Huffington Post was already Adaptive Semantic’s largest and only outside investor, buying a 20 percent stake in April, 2009. Adaptive Semantic’s two co-founders, Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz, will join Huffington Post to oversee its social news and community technology R&D. The acquisition price was not disclosed “Technology is very critical to us,” says CEO Eric Hippeau. “In this case, the technology has implications for our content. It makes moderation hyper-efficient.” With close to 3 million comments a month, the only way to moderate them is through automation tools (as well as a corp of about 30 professional human moderators). Other companies that license Adaptive Semantic’s technology for online comment moderation include CNN, Newsweek, and Disqus. They might have to start looking for other solutions. “We will honor the contracts, but very likely will not renew them,” says Hippeau, who doesn’t want to be in the business of licensing technology to other news sites and services. JuLiA uses “supervised machine learning,” according to Revesz, to flag inappropriate comments, spam, and abusive language. Humans manually tag a few hundred comments, which then get fed into the semantic analysis engine and applied across every comment. This is an ongoing process so that the system continually gets better and better. Not only can it detect abusive language or hate speech, but it can also help find commenters who may be topic experts. Beyond comment moderation and making sure readers behave themselves on the site, the underlying semantic analysis technology can help bubble up the best contributions from readers. “I am very confident that we are going to find all kinds of ways to apply it,” says Hippeau. The Huffington Post very much sees itself as a social news network, and its success is tied to engaging its readers in a variety of ways, from leaving comments to sharing posts across the Web via Twitter and Facebook. It recently started awarding readers badges . JuLiA could help to feature the best comments or to award specific badges. For instance, if a reader leaves a lot of comments on posts about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Hillary Clinton, they could get a Foreign Policy badge. That is just a hypothetical example, but the technology opens the door to those kinds of features. It also could be applied to article recommendations. “The Huffington Post talks a lot about their social graph,” says Haliczer, “how people are connecting to each other and connecting to content. We can look at the content graph and recommend content to people.” Whatever the Huffington Post will end up doing with the technology, it is important enough that the company wants to own it in-house. CrunchBase Information Huffington Post Adaptive Semantics Information provided by CrunchBase
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Huffington Post Buys Adaptive Semantics To Keep Up With 100,000 Comments A Day
WordPress Gives Us The VIP Treatment, Goes Down On Us Again
Well, that was fun. If you tried to access TechCrunch any time in the last hour or so, you probably noticed that it wasn’t working at all. Instead, you were greeted by the overly cheery notice “ WordPress.com will be back in a minute! ” Had we written that message ourselves, there would have been significantly more profanity. The cause of the downtime is still being determined; we’re waiting for more details from WordPress.com, the hosted blogging platform that is home to over 10 million blogs. We’re hosted under their VIP program, as are other large sites like GigaOm and some of CNN’s blogs. As far as we can tell, all 10+ million blogs hosted by WordPress were affected by the downtime. Needless to say, we’re pretty upset. WordPress has a fairly reliable track record overall, but it was only a few months ago that WordPress suffered their worst downtime in four years, when all hosted blogs were down for around 110 minutes. At the time, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote on the company’s blog that he hoped “it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again”. It’s been less than four months. We’re awaiting further details from the WordPress team (we expect they’ll have an update on their official blog shortly). Update: Mullenweg responded in the comments below with some more details: As you’ve noticed, we’ve brought the vast majority of blogs back, including yours. We’re currently working on bringing back the rest (including GigaOM), we have to verify their options data first, then the home page, then stats. However if you’re back already like TC is everything should work as normal. The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs. Mike and team at TC: you guys have jinxed us, but we still love you. These past two rapid-fire incidents have been cringe-worthy and painful, and I’m sorry they both happened shortly after your switch to VIP. CrunchBase Information WordPress Information provided by CrunchBase
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WordPress Gives Us The VIP Treatment, Goes Down On Us Again
Bing Gets A Foursquare Badge For The World Cup, With Thrillist Tips
World Cup mania is about to begin and that means one thing: it’s a social media branding opportunity! On Friday, in time for the first kickoff, Bing is going to release a World Cup badge on Foursquare which can be unlocked by people who follow Bing on the service. The badge, which is a Bing soccer jersey (see leaked image), will be tied to bars and other venues in select U.S. cities such as New York, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle where fans will gather to watch the games. Some of the bars and restaurants will also have tips, which will come from Thrillist , and people who follow Bing and check into those places may be offered specials regardless of whether they earn the badge. (Incidentally, earlier this week Thrillist launched it’s own i Phone app , filled with its own reviews of bars, restaurants and shops sprinkled on a Google map. It was downloaded 10,000 times in the first 24 hours, and is currently one of the top free Lifestyle apps, although it would be better if it used the Foursquare API to allow you to check into places too. Update : I was wrong. It turns out you can check into places via Foursquare, or share via Twitter, Facebook or email through a “share” button on the detail page of each venue, which is kind of hidden, but it is there). So how do you find these soccer bars? Glad you asked. Bing will also be introducing a new Bing Map App on Bing Maps called HomeTurfFinder which will show you where you can watch World Cup matches in those select cities (see screenshot below), along with surfacing related Foursquare checkins and tips. Bing is not the first brand to get a World Cup badge from Foursquare. CNN announced two badges on Tuesday in the image of a CNN soccer ball. Sponsoring a World Cup badge is an easy way for big brands like CNN and Bing to get people to follow them on Foursquare. At least they are not trying to sell us anything. They just want us to like them. Who’s next for the hat trick? CrunchBase Information Bing Foursquare Thrillist.com Information provided by CrunchBase
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Bing Gets A Foursquare Badge For The World Cup, With Thrillist Tips
Foreclosures Rise During the First Quarter of 2010 | Trends at …
Foreclosure filings during the first three months of 2010 rose 7 percent from the previous quarter to more than 930000, according to CNN Money. Realty.
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Foreclosures Rise During the First Quarter of 2010 | Trends at …
