Foursquare appears to be winning the SXSW battle for supremacy against Gowalla, according to a trend forming in the stream of tweets we follow on Silicon Alley Insider.
On the right side of the site we have “The Hive.” We follow hundreds of people in tech, take the headlines and links they’re tweeting, collect them and rank them. (More explanation here.)
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Apple had a chance to own mobile advertising company AdMob for $600 million, but blew it, the New York Times reports.
In a story detailing the rancor between Apple and Google, Brad Stone and Miguel Helft report Apple made a formal bid to purchase AdMob for $600 million. Apple then had a 45 day period for due diligence where AdMob entered into an agreement that wouldn’t allow the company to shop itself around.
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There are a lot of great venture capitalists who started out as entrepreneurs like Vinod Khosla or Josh Kopelman. Going the other way, however, seems to be a bit tougher. In fact, I don’t really know anyone who has successfully gone the other way.
Many entrepreneurs turned VCs wind up going back, but to start out on the investment side and then successfully launch a company seems to happen much less frequently. There are exceptions to everything, of course, but as someone who started out in venture and investing (GM pension, then Union Square Ventures) and then started a company that failed (Path 101), I learned a ton about what it really takes to drive a successful business forward—skills and a mindset that doesn’t necessarily square with the way venture investors think of the world.
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Whoa, Nelly! Isn’t this something? Apple has just posted details on its iPad battery replacement service, which is really not a battery replacement service at all. Check out the company’s opening line:
“If your iPad requires service due to the battery’s diminished ability to hold an electrical charge, Apple will replace your iPad for a service fee.”
Now, let’s compare that to the verbiage found in the iPhone’s battery replacement program details:
“If your iPhone requires service only because the battery’s ability to hold an electrical charge has diminished, Apple will service your iPhone for a service fee.”
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From TechCrunch:
The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people.
It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.
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Bloomberg digs to the bottom of how Annie Leibovitz survived her brush with death Art Capital last summer.
The short story is that she found someone else to bail her out. That someone was Richard Nanula of Colony Capital.
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In this week’s bipolar app roundup:
Foursquare, squared!
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The Financial Times reported Saturday that Google is “99.9 percent certain” that it will shut its China search engine at Google.cn. It has been eight weeks since Google said it would no longer censor search in China.
The Chinese government has handled this much better than expected given, from their perspective, Google’s very public provocation. They did not do anything rash, like preemptively shutting Google.cn, possibly on the pretense of porn on Google.cn (which amazingly is still there if you look hard enough). Instead, they reiterated that all companies in China need to obey Chinese law and waited for Google to make a move. I have no specific knowledge of Google’s attempts to negotiate, though “negotiate” is probably not what the Chinese government was doing when it came to a discussion about providing unfiltered search results.
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Google’s CEO went to Abu Dhabi this week and preached. He sermonized about Google’s exceptional virtue — its indifference to profit and supreme trustworthiness. His speech should have been shocking. Except that delusional self-righteousness is now routine at Google.
Eric Schmidt’s comments at the Abu Dhabi “media summit” certainly sound especially cocky even considering the Google CEO’s past haughty pronouncements. Schmidt, Fortune reports, implied Google is more trustworthy than any government on the planet after he was was asked asked about the company’s worrisome stash of private data on its users, Schmidt :
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Google is “99.9%” certain to close down its Chinese search engine, the FT reports after speaking with a source at the company.
Even after Google closes the search engine, it will take time to close down the business and the FT says Google wants to “takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities.”
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So much for eating your own cooking.
Nick Wingfield, WSJ: iPhone users are in plain sight at Microsoft. At the sprawling campus here in a Seattle suburb, workers peck away on their iPhone touch-screens in conference rooms, cafeterias and lobbies. Among the top Microsoft executives who use the iPhone is J Allard, who helped create the Xbox game console and is chief experience officer for the entertainment and devices division.
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Finally, someone in the government is suggesting steering some tax dollars where they should have been steered all along: Toward building a national digital infrastructure that will make America less of an embarrassment relative to the rest of the developed world.
Of course, telecom companies and TV broadcasters are already fighting the plan tooth and nail.
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AT&T was the biggest joke of South by Southwest last year. The thousands of iPhone owners flocking to Austin crushed its 3G network, making it useless.
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View the charts from the week as a slideshow →