If you commute to work everyday, chances are you’re not alone. There are people all around you on the road doing the same thing. And some may be even going to the same place. But when you’re each in your own vehicle, you obviously can’t communicate and interact. Social mapmaking tool Waze is trying to help with that.

A few feature in their Waze 2.0 release is that you can now form and join groups. Maybe it’s a group that goes from San Francisco to Mountain View each day. Or maybe your group is one that regularly goes from New York City to the Hamptons on the weekends. Groups can really be anything, you just have to have similar driving patterns.

Why is that useful? Because someone else who regularly does the same drive as you might be able to point out useful things to you. Maybe they know the people place to get gas. Or the best diner to stop at along the way. Or maybe you want to chat with another group member (when you’re not driving, obviously), or follow them along their path. Think of it as a roving social network for drivers.

Another new feature of Waze 2.0 is personal gaming. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Waze is the gaming element — you’re encouraged to drive around places that people haven’t been before the earn points. As Waze continues to grow, it’s harder to find these areas, so the game isn’t as fun. But with Waze 2.0 you have your own gameboard based on only places you’ve been (so other people don’t count).

The new version also cartography and animation, we’re told. Sadly, for now, the group feature will only be enabled for Waze’s iPhone and Android apps. You can look for those soon.

Playspan has scored a number of high profile deals to power micropayments for social networks, game developers, media companies and gaming platforms. Today, Playspan is announcing that it will be deploying its payments platform on Sanrio Digital’s social game Hello Kitty Online.

Hello Kitty Online, which is in private beta, is the official massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty brand. Hello Kitty Online combines elements of social networking, including blogs, video sharing and email, as well as gaming components such as customizable avatars, guilds, pets and crafting.

Specifically, the game will offer an Item Mall, where users can buy virtual-goods through purchased Sanrio Cash Points or earned Sanrio Loyalty Points. PlaySpan’s technology will help power payments for these goods.

Hello Kitty is no doubt a popular brand when it comes to electronics and other merchandise, so it should be interesting to see how the company’s foray into social gaming works out.

You'll soon be able to watch "Dinner for Schmucks" via Netflix instant streaming. The company inked a deal with Epix, a new pay TV channel, for the rights to Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate movies. The deal cost Netflix $1 billion. That's quite a bit of money, yes.

For those placing bets on which startup Google will buy next in its impressive social shopping spree (Jambool, Slide, etc.), you might want to lower your wager on Gowalla, at least for now. According to founder, CEO Josh Williams, Google has yet to initiate takeover talks with the the location based service— although, he says reading the market speculation “made me smile just a little bit.”

Google or no Google, Williams remains adamantly upbeat, even as competition escalates in the scorching hot LBS market and rival Foursquare sprints ahead. At last count, Foursquare has racked up about 2 million users, while Gowalla is pushing ahead with a more modest army of 400,000 users. You could attribute some of Williams’ optimism to a recent pick-up in Gowalla’s numbers— according to his figures, the service is adding a couple thousand users a day now, a 50% increase from last month and the percentage of daily active users is increasing at an even faster rate— but Williams also seems genuinely comfortable with Gowalla’s pace, at least for now.

We got a chance to talk to Williams via Skype about competition, the new API (and why it took so long), the “6 commandments” and his fascination with the “real check-in,” video above.

While an analogy to Aesop’s cliche fable of the tortoise and the hare is probably unfair, Gowalla has moved  carefully and deliberately relative to its rivals, focusing on sharp design and holding back product launches until they’re fully baked.

Take for instance this week’s formal announcement of Gowalla’s Check-In API with full write-support. While Foursquare’s full API has been out since last November, Gowalla only released a read-only version in February and has been developing the full API with OAuth2 support for the last six months.

“It was something that we’ve been really pondering the right way to do for awhile now and some of the delay in getting out the door was due to some technical limitation on the Gowalla platform that have now been fixed,” Williams says. “And then some of the other delays were simply around us wanting to make sure we had our head in the right place when we rolled it out. Again ya’ll [TechCrunch] had some fun with the six commandments of Gowalla check-ins but we wanted to make sure that we were providing the right ecosystem for developers.”

I interpret “head in the right place” as code for understanding brand identity. Although Gowalla does not seem to be in a rush to acquire as many users as possible, Williams has been very focused on refining Gowalla’s message and differentiating his startup from the rest of the field— namely Foursquare. As Williams implies (and as my colleague MG Siegler points out in Monday’s post), the core of Gowalla’s identity is strongly reflected in the API’s 6 commandments:

* Check in where the user actually is
* Don't encourage checking in where the user isn't
* Never check in without permission from the user
* Encourage social behavior, discourage bot-like behavior
* Rapid, repeated checkins are not tolerated
* Use the API responsibly

Or to put it more succinctly: authenticity.

“At the very least, we wanted to provide some guidelines for developers…that gave them a little bit of an idea of what…the character and vision of Gowalla is, specifically that of connecting real people and real places,” Williams says. Elaborating on his vision even further, Williams says, “I think the goal for us has always been to find ways for people to share their love and connection with real places, we kind of have this metaphor of the passport, that being a record or log of the places you’ve been, the places that are important to you. And we definitely see even the new features that we’re building as being extensions of that…As time goes on, I think we all understand that location is going to become a very much commoditized asset on the social web… [And] I think that once that starts to happen, the nuances and the differences and the values behind all those services will start to become more apparent.”

As Williams insinuates, fake check-ins have no place in Gowalla’s mission. The operative mantra is “real people and real places,” which he says will be more evident in the coming months, as Gowalla builds new layers on top of the check-in process. He didn’t want to give away too much, but later this month users can expect new tools to help them share their affinity for specific locations and eventually, Gowalla is expected to support video-sharing (i.e. quick 10-20 second clips).

Is that enough to set Gowalla apart from Foursquare and more importantly, provide a strong value proposition for prospective users? Not yet, at least not in its current form, but there’s still plenty of time to catch up—- or get acquired.

Google cannot contain its legal problems surrounding the inadvertent collection of personal data from WiFi networks by ots global fleet of Street View cars. Earlier today, police in South Korea raided Google’s offices there to confiscate computers storing data collected from Street View cars in that country. This action follows similar investigations in France, Germany, the UK (where Google was cleared), and a multi-state investigation in the U.S.

Google was preparing to launch Street View in Korea and had deployed a fleet of vehicles equipped with cameras and WiFi-sniffing technology to collect street-level images for Google Maps. The cars use fixed Wifi networks to help determine their location, but these cars have been found to be collecting personal payload data as well. In the past, Google has explained that this data collection was “a mistake” stemming from the inclusion of some experimental code from a previous WiFi project.

Google stated last May that it grounded its Street View fleet once it discovered this problem to strip out the personal data and, presumably, the bad code. It is not clear whether Google forgot to strip the code in Korea, or the Korean authorities are reacting to the news from May and investigating data collected before then. But that one piece of code is proving to be a huge liability for Google.

Photo credit: Flickr/Byrion Smith.

Meet Precious. Precious will ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Tweeting his stats along the way and making assessments over time including comments on the weather, hilliness of the terrain, and speed. Why? Because it can.

You can follow the old boy over here and he and his riders are raising money for Livestrong. You can donate here.

Read more…

It looks like Intuit just acquired Cha-Ching, a Mac web app and iPhone app to help consumers manage their personal finance. According to the site of Midnight Apps, the developer of Cha-Ching, “The Cha-Ching team has merged with Intuit and will continue to provide you great design, useful features and incredible products as part of the Intuit Personal Finance Group.”

Cha-Ching appears to have been taken down from the App store. Similar to Mint.com (which Intuit acquired last year for $170 million), Cha-Ching’s Mac and iPhone apps allow users to keep track of daily transactions and bank accounts. You can schedule bills and payments, set budgets and upload receipts.

It’s unclear how Cha-Ching will be folded into Intuit, but the company could be using the technology to boost their Apple applications, which includes the Mint iPhone app and a Quicken app for Mac. And its looks like Intuit is trying to replace their existing personal finace product Quicken online with Mint.com, so Cha-Ching’s consumer-focused technology could be part of this strategy. And of course, Intuit will be acquiring the team from Midnight Apps.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed at this time.

Hat tip to Brazil’s Mac Magazine (translated version here).

Open source software has many benefits, but one of the greatest is the ability to not reinvent the wheel. By sharing solutions, the open source community is able to develop great software quickly and effectively. Although open source software usually stands alone, on ideological grounds, you can easily find examples of open source software in a great number of successful proprietary applications, too. Some open source licenses permit use in proprietary software, and some does not. Navigating the plethora of open source and free software licenses can be confusing to developers. Some open source code gets inappropriately bundled into proprietary software intentionally, as a short-cut to success, and some gets bundled in violation of the open source licenses by accident or negligence. It can be expensive and embarrassing to companies when this sort of misappropriation of open source software occurs. Today the Linux Foundation is launching the Open Compliance Program to help avoid just these sorts of problems.

A young lady named Jennifer – the Internet is now hunting down her last name – sent a selection of thirty-three photos to her entire office of twenty people detailing why she’s quitting. Mostly it was because of a man named Spencer who called her a HPOA (go ahead and look it up or just look at the pictures) but you’ll note one important slide in her presentation.

That’s right: Spencer was a TechCrunch reader!

Spencer spent 5.3 hours on TechCrunch. That’s a good hour a day, every day. Take this as a “recommended dosage” and increase as necessary. Also, don’t be a Spencer. Also, hire this young lady. She seems to know her stuff, especially if she was thoughtful enough to spy on her own spiteful boss.

UPDATE – The last word on the HOPA/HPOA debate comes from here and it can be spelled either way. Either way, incidentally, it’s also a horrible thing to say.

via TheChive

Gogo Inflight Internet by Aircell and GroundLink's LimoRes.com today announced a partnership and promotion to give air travelers free, inflight wifi.

The way you get the freebie is pretty standard: while you’re flying access Gogo’s portal, look for the ground transportation link and book a limo from the airport in your destination city. Wait for a promotional code to arrive in your e-mail inbox. It’s good for one free, inflight internet session. You can redeem it immediately or on a later flight.

Typically, Gogo Inflight internet costs about $5 an hour, $13 a day and $40 per month for mobile pc users. It costs slightly less for users of wireless enabled mobile devices. Gogo’s services are available on 3,500 daily flights in the continental U.S. according to a press statement by Aircell.

The Groundlink and Aircell deal begins Tuesday (Aug. 10) and will continue "hopefully indefinitely," says the chief executive of GroundLink Alex Mashinsky.

A long-time telecommunciations entrepreneur, inventor and investor, Mashinsky has been on a mission to provide voice and web connectivity everywhere on the ground and underground in the U.S.

He recently embarked on a project rigging up New York City’s limos and livery cars with outlets (to charge electronics) and antennae, in order to provide ad-supported roving wifi services. The free wifi would be available to passengers, drivers and anyone within a range of 400 feet.

Another company Mashinsky heads up, QWireless, is part of a joint venture bringing wifi and cellular signals to 277 NYC subway stations and tunnels.

Mashinsky approached Aircell's Gogo Internet group, he says, because travelers crave connectivity.

“We wanted to take the office experience and expand it door to door,” the CEO explained “so you can take your car to the airport, stay connected to your phone and wireless internet even charging your devices on the way, then get through the airport still connected, board the plane and continue your work. You can do a conference or anything else without interruption or power or connectivity no matter where you go."

GroundLink will pay a fee to Gogo for each air traveler who is motivated to book a ride via LimoRes.com through the promotion. But its rates per ride will not differ from what LimoRes offers to those who book otherwise.

Mashinsky notes that reserving a limo sounds more expensive than it is to many consumers. A Taxi ride from Newark to Mashinsky’s office in New York City recently cost his marketing director $72, while a limo ride cost the (delighted) CEO $70.

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IBM has acquired Datacap, a company that provides a data and document capturing and processing software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Datacap software automates image and data entry from a variety of documents and forms, including medical claims, tax returns and highly variable documents such as invoices and shipping documents for more precise business outcomes. Datacap extracts and converts data from a number of file types, including email files, JPEG and GIF image files, and PowerPoint presentations in seconds.

Mobile advertising company Medialets has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by the Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis. This brings Medialets’ total funding up to $10 million.

Medialets launched in 2008 with Feedburner-like model of free developer tools except for mobile ad application analytics. But as the mobile ad network market saturated, Medialets’ CEO Eric Litman decided to take the company in a different direction. The company began developing rich media ad formats and saw a strong response from both brands and publishers.

Last year, Medialets shifted its strategy from being a full-fledged ad network to helping publishers sell rich media ads directly to brands. On the publisher side, Medialets provides all the tools to go and sell ad inventory for mobile rich media ads independently and trains publishers’ salesforce as well. For brands, Medialets evangelizes their ad formats and the mobile ad opportunities provided by big-name publishers, serving as a middle man between publishers like CNN and advertisers like Coca-Cola.

The company is now one of the most widely used ad platforms and counts NPR, CNN and Fox as publisher clients.

Of course, Medialets also offers its rich media ads to developers who use mobile ad networks; providing a universal SDK that allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. The company offers the SDK for iPhone, Android and iPad platforms. Currently the SDK works with Jumptap, Mojiva and a number of other ad networks, but Litman says they are in negotiations with other mobile ad networks as well. Litman ads that Medialets’ reach is in the “dozens of millions.”

The cornerstone to Medialets’ ads, as we've written in the past, is the promise that its rich media and display advertising on mobile phones will provides deeper engagement with users. Engagement is the primary measurement that the ad platform focuses on when determining the success of its advertising campaigns. But developers and advertisers may be more beholden to click-through rates, which Medialets claim are between 1 and 8 percent.

While Litman declined to give us specifics about sales, he said that Medialets’ revenue is doubling month over month. This is not surprising considering the fast growth that other mobile advertising platforms, such as Millennial Media, Google’s AdMob and even Apple’s iAd, are seeing in the space. And Litman says that mobile advertising is going to be a $12 to $14 billion market by 2014. “We want to be defacto standard for rich media advertising in mobile,” says Litman.

Cloud-based storage and sharing application Box.net has focused on offering its content management system wherever the workforce is, whether that be in the office, or on a mobile device. The startup offers iPhone and iPad apps, that allow users to access, share and collaborate on the go. Today, Box is upgrading its iPhone and iPad apps with the ability to access content even without a Wifi connection. The new update to the apps allows users to save files for offline access so that users can read any content even if their mobile app doesn't have wireless connectivity. The update also allows users to sync saved files with updated versions when a collaborator makes a change on any Box platform. Box has added support for iOS4, fast app switching, and high-res graphics.

Tagadas is a newly launched private buying club in the UK. Only unlike the more general designer offerings of Vente-Privee, Brands4friends and their various competitors, the London-based startup is attacking a more specific vertical: baby and children's products from brands such as French Connection and Minihaha. It could also be seen as a British version of US-based Zulily.com, which like Tagadas is targeting parents. Zulily recently received $6m in investment led by August Capital, with participation by existing investor Maveron, bringing the total raised to $10.4m, so it's very well funded. In comparison, Tagadas' founder Samuel Serra (who previously co-founded ReceiptFarm with Matt Collins) has thus far bootstrapped the startup with his own money and that from friends and family, having originally tested demand via nothing more than a sign-up page and an adwords campaign. Today the site claims over 5,000 registered members, having only just opened its doors.

When I first heard the news that Google Wave was dead last week, I was surprised. I wasn’t surprised because it was a thriving, successful product (obviously, it wasn’t). I was surprised because of the gushing I heard about it from within Google leading up to and immediately following its introduction. To hear them tell it, this was the future. So I was obviously surprised that they only gave the “future” one year to prove itself. And that’s being generous.

Obviously, I knew part of that gushing was the same bullshit hype and marketing that any company applies to any new product. But it really did seem as if some key executives — everyone from Vic Gundotra to Sergey Brin — were genuinely excited about Wave. And rightfully so. As I wrote at the time, it was ambitious as hell.

But my full quote on it, as remembered by Business Insider last week, is more fitting:

It's ambitious as hell — which we love — but that also leaves it open to the possibility of it falling on its face. But that's how great products are born.

Obviously, Wave ended up falling on its face. It crashed, as it were. No great product was born.

But I’m getting the nagging feeling that it crashed because Google just didn’t handle it properly. Was it hard to understand? Yes. But so what — so is email when you really stop to think about it. Did it solve a problem? No. But so what — neither does Twitter.

I think Wave is simply a case where Google’s get-it-out-there-early mentality failed. Because the product was somewhat complex and Google itself didn’t know what to do with it, or how to pitch it, it flopped. It really is that simple.

In my view (obviously, with the benefit of hindsight), Wave should have been an experimental productivity tool that was wrapped into Google Docs. It should not have been billed as some sort of next generation communication tool for the masses. At least not at first.

Or, if Google really wanted to try and shove it in peoples’ faces in that way, they should have done what they did with Buzz, and crammed it into Gmail.

Wave inside of Gmail would have been potentially interesting, I think. But as its own product, it suffered from the same thing that so many other products do: the I-don’t-have-time-to-go-there or I-forgot-I-was-supposed-to-go-there problem. Not enough attention is paid to such a small thing. But it really is true that another service really just means another service we have to visit in order to use. Eventually (and increasingly) we all run out of time. There are just too many sites to visit. That’s a huge barrier to entry. Even for Google.

Would anyone use Buzz if it weren’t in Gmail? Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t sound too sure when I asked him about Buzz last week. He also confirmed that they considered putting Wave inside of Gmail in the same way that Buzz is, but decided against it.

Something else interesting that Schmidt said during that conversation was:

We try things. Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it's absolutely okay to try something that's very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that.

I love that idea. And while some may think he’s being disingenuous there, based on my experience with the large amount of Googlers I’ve met and/or know, I believe the culture actually is very much like that.

The problem, again, is that you need to give these types of experiments time. Sure, you shouldn’t let an idea that isn’t working bankrupt the company. But obviously that wasn’t happening here. And it just didn’t seem like Google was doing much to even try to help Wave get rolling.

Remember how Google pitched Wave as not so much the product, but as a protocol that developers would build on top of? What happened to that idea? I’m hardly the only one wondering that. I’m just not sure how you can throw that grandiose idea out there and then kill it in far less than a year.

And let’s be honest, saying Google gave Wave a year is generous. While it was unveiled at I/O last year, it didn’t actually start rolling out until several weeks after that to a small amount of people. Most people didn’t get access to it until several weeks after that — some even had to wait months. Hell, it wasn’t even fully open until May of this year. As in 2010. As in, not even three months ago.

I mean, there really must have been no one using Wave for Google to can the project that soon after opening it to the public.

But again, what did they expect? It was a service that was supposed to be a platform. It was a platform that only ever really existed as a service. It was a service with a confusing UI. It was a service with about twenty too many buttons to hit. It was the opposite of Keep It Simple, Stupid. It was just weird.

But the technology behind it seemed pretty solid and interesting — particularly in the scope of the future of the web as Google sees it: HTML5. Google is spending so much time and energy on Google Docs to try and kill Microsoft Office, but really all they’re doing is taking most of the same Office ideas and putting them in the web browser. Why not shake shit up and attempt to use Wave technology to make collaboration really interesting? Obviously, this should be experimental — but as we just went over, that’s Google’s thing: experimental.

I like to think my own natural usage of a new service is a pretty good barometer of how well it will do. And I’ll be honest, like seemingly everyone else, I wasn’t using Google Wave. But the weird thing is that I wanted to use Google Wave, I just wasn’t presented with a compelling reason to do so. And that’s on Google.

The interest was clearly there: witness the thousands of invites that were selling for ludicrous amounts of money on eBay. Witness the fact that “Google Wave” was a top query leading to TechCrunch for months. Witness how long it was a Trending Topic on Twitter. Witness that I was approached to write a book about Wave — before it was even released. Witness the coverage of its death.

Let’s hope that Google can “take the learning from that,” as Schmidt put it, and apply it to Google Me.

Meet Eric Fisher, Product Designer at Facebook and Design Advisor at local search site Milo. Fisher also has the notable and somewhat curious designation of being the first cousin of Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who plays his real life boss Mark Zuckerberg in the upcoming Aaron Sorkin movie The Social Network.

Fisher, who has been at Facebook since February, says he and Eisenberg are pretty close and share similar interests. In true geek family fashion, they jointly run a wordplay game at oneupme.com, which has received a modest amount of press coverage.

In some especially weird coincidence, according to Fisher, Eisenberg usually plays characters that remind people of him, “I’m really interested to see if this particular character [Zuckerberg] will do the same, which I’d find neat, since I really respect Mark and like working with him at Facebook.”

When asked whether Zuckerberg was cool with the movie, Fisher said we’d have to defer to what the Facebook CEO has already told press (we’ve contacted Facebook for more details). In the same TV interview where he first revealed the Eisenberg cousin connection, Zuckerberg also expressed his views on the film.

"I just think people have a lot of fiction…. The real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time, I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? …We just sat at our computers for six years and coded."

When asked whether fellow Facebook employees were curious about Fisher’s familial connection to the movie, Fisher replied:

“I’m actually surprised at how often the Jesse/Zuck thing comes up in conversation but I guess it’s a hot topic right now. I have talked with Jesse a lot about the movie and about working at Facebook … it’s an odd duality: he’s impressed I’m working with Mark and I’m impressed he’s playing him.”

Eisenberg himself has previously reassured Zuckerberg about  The Social Network’s reportedly incendiary nature, insisting,“This is not some kind of expose. It’s just an interesting story.”

As is this one. Small world, indeed.

Photo: Movie Cultist

Top Photo: Fishofthebay

The iPad is fostering all sorts of new ideas for how to create digital books, and the most interesting ones do not come in iBook form. Instead, they are being delivered as apps. A great example of this is Fotopedia Heritage, the first of a series of photo books for the iPad and iPhone (iTunes link).

It is not just a photo book dumped into the iPad. The Fotopedia photo book app goes well beyond what any conventional coffee table photo book can offer, making more than 20,000 high quality images of World Heritage sites available literally at your fingertips. Fotopedia creator, and former Apple technologist, Jean-Marie Hullot, gave me a run-through of the app in the video above (apologies in advance for the poor lighting, I took this on my iPhone).

The app is also available on the iPhone, but it was really designed with the iPad in mind. You can browse through stunning photos of World Heritage sites by simply swiping through them. Each photo has a number of tags related to the places and objects they depict. By pressing a tag with your finger, you can switch from photos of France to photos of Paris to photos of the Eiffel Tower, or from photos of Thailand to photos of temples. In this way, you can hop from one set of related photos to the next. If you want to go faster, you can pull up a filmstrip which appears on the right hand side and can be swiped independently.

All of the photos are pulled from Fotopedia, a social photo site which launched two years ago at TechCrunch50. The community of photographers on Fotopedia are extremely talented, most of the photos are under Creative Commons license, and each photo is linked to a Google Map and Wikipedia article. It is designed to document the world through photos. The iPad book is a way to organize a specific collection of photos. Fotopedia will release a new book every month or so. The next one is on national parks.

Since Fotopedia is a structured database of photos. Most photos are linked to Wikipedia articles, which create the foundational text for the book. You can also see on a map where any photo was taken, as well as links to TripAdvisor. And any photo can be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The Fotopedia books will be free when they are assembled from community photos with a Creative Commons license, it will also be a template for photographers on Fotopedia to join together and create paid-download photo apps using other images. In those cases, Fotopedia would get a cut of the download sales.

The app is essentially a slice of the Fotopedia Website packaged up nicely. I asked Hullot why doesn’t he simply do the same thing in the browser. His answer is that he will, but that it won’t be as seamless as the app. Still, this approach to digital books shows what can be accomplished when a digital book is connected to the Web—you get endless selection, and structured data that is searchable and shareable. Eventually, there shouldn’t be any difference between books and the Web.

Back in June, we heard from a couple of good sources that an executive exodus was about to take place at Palm, as everyone waited for the HP deal to go through. We can now confirm that the exodus did in fact take place, and we have some names to prove it.

We first reported earlier today that Peter Skillman, the Vice President of Design at Palm had left the company. But while he was very important to the company (he was the designer of the Palm Pre) he wasn’t technically an executive. Following the completion of the HP deal, Palm has taken down their executive page. But here’s who was on the Management Team:

• Jon Rubinstein, Chairman and CEO
• Michael Abbott, SVP, Application Software and Services
• Mike Bell, SVP, Product Development
• Jeff Devine, SVP, Global Operations
• Mary Doyle, General Counsel
• Doug Jeffries, CFO
• Katie Mitic, SVP, Product Marketing
• Way Ting, SVP, System Software
• Dave Whalen, SVP, Global Sales
• Jeff Zwerner, SVP, Brand Design

Of those, it has been reported previously that Abbott left to join Twitter and Bell left to join Intel. Abbott’s departure from Palm was actually revealed through some SEC filings in April. That same filings revealed that Palm had offered other executives huge retention packages, with large cash bonuses and restricted stock (both spread out over two years) to entice them to stay around. Those executives included Jeffries, Devine, Bell, Whalen, Zwerner, and Mitic.

Of those, Bell (obviously) turned it down, while Devine and Jeffries apparently accepted (as noted in the 8-K filing). Also apparently turning down the offers were Mitic and Zwerner, who both left Palm in June, we’ve confirmed.

Mitic was formerly a Yahoo exec and an Executive in Residence at both Elevation Partners (the firm that pumped all the money into Palm towards the end) and Kleiner Perkins. She had been with Palm since June 2009 and was responsible for my favorite quote at their developer event last Fall: ”We want to leave it all out there. You know, 'The Full Monty'." (Interestingly enough, it appears that she has recently deleted her LinkedIn profile — perhaps to mask the move?)

Zwerner, meanwhile, was the executive who brought his expertise in brand design to “Palm's global advertising, marketing communications, PR, events and web design.” He was one of the many ex-Apple employees (he actually worked there two different times) that Rubinstein brought over to Palm. From what we’re hearing, when he did leave in June, it was not on good terms.

Rubinstein obviously stayed with the company and is now an executive (of some sort) at HP. It’s not yet clear if Doyle, Ting, or Whalen have stuck around as well — you’ll note that only Whalen was on the list being offered the retention bonus, so it doesn’t look good. We have reached out to Palm to try and see about each of them. I suspect one or more has moved on, which means that in the last few months, at least half of the executive team of Palm is gone.

One name not on Palm’s executive page is Mitch Allen, the CTO. I have confirmed with the company that he remains and is currently managing webOS engineering for HP now. That’s good news seeing as it’s so vital to their future plans, and he was one of the primary architects of the software (along with Abbott).

Aside from the executives, here are the other important employees known to have left recently:

• Matias Duarte, who led webOS design work, left for Google to work on Android in May.
• Caitlin Spaan, Palm's vice president of carrier marketing who had been with the company for 14 years, left in April.
• Rich Dellinger, the man behind webOS notifications went to Apple in June.
• Lynn Fox, the head of PR, also left in June.

You’ll forgive me if I left anyone out. It’s getting hard to keep track of all of the departures at this point. It certainly seems as if there are fewer management-level employees that stayed at Palm/HP than the number that left.

Luckily for HP, the exodus appears to have mostly ended a couple months ago. Palm simply forgot to tell everyone. Hopefully now they can focus on making solid devices centered around webOS going forward. Well, once that pesky CEO situation is resolved.

Android 2.2, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system that is now being deployed to popular devices like the Droid and Evo, is a speed demon. Unfortunately, it’s also tone-deaf: the OS comes with a strage flaw that makes your headphones sound like a pair of tin cans whenever you tune into a streaming music service like Pandora or MOG. Music that sounds great on the same device running an older version of Android suddenly sounds muddy with tinny highs — you can make out the notes and lyrics, but they’re no longer enjoyable to listen to.

I first noticed the problem a few weeks ago and was sure that my Bluetooth headset was to blame, but we’ve since gotten multiple reports that other users have had the same problem. Numerous forum threads have popped up about the issue, as has this lengthy bug report on Google Code. According to comments on the bug report, the problem is related to Android’s switch from the OpenCore media framework to Stagefright. The latter supports HTTP progressive streaming, but cannot properly handle the AAC+ and eAAC+ media codecs — which are used by some of the most popular music streaming services.

Fortunately, a fix is in the works. A Google spokesperson tell us:

“We have fixed the bug, and are working with our partners to update the affected Android devices as quickly as possible.”

Google doesn’t have a timeframe for when the fix will be deployed (it sounds like it will vary by device), but hopefully it will be in the very near future.

Services like Pandora, the recently launched MOG, and TuneWiki are obviously reliant on having their streaming audio sound good. The Android team has known about the problem for well over a month now, if not longer. And, to make matters worse, users are more likely to blame an audio problem on whatever service they’re listening to rather than the OS itself.

Not thrilled with this morning’s Verizon-Google seven-tier joint policy proposal, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps put out the following one paragraph statement earlier today, basically asserting that the FCC is more interested in protecting consumer rights than Google and Verizon’s wishes.

"Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That's one of its many problems. It is time to move a decision forward—a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever, and to put the interests of consumers in front of the interests of giant corporations."

While many of the ideas put forth in today’s Verizon-Google proposal were Net Neutrality friendly, Copps is most likely referring to the proposal’s more controversial elements such as the wholesale exclusion of wireless Internet or “new services” from any sort of Net Neutrality edict. Specifically, the points put across in tiers five and and six which imply that wireless and mobile services that do not yet exist would be under different rules, to be determined.

Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt hope that their suggested legislative framework will make a “constructive contribution to the dialogue,” but Cook’s relatively shorter statement emphasized the importance of the FCC’s authority in making the decision, perhaps with at lot less power in the hands of corporations with so much at stake.

Photo: Myki Roventine

The hits just keep on coming for HP. Hot on the heels of the massive story of HP CEO Mark Hurd’s resignation amid scandal, another high-level person has left the company. Peter Skillman, the Vice President of Design at Palm (which HP officially purchased in July) has left the company, we’ve confirmed.

It’s not clear where Skillman is going next, but he had been with Palm for 11 years. And that’s a big blow for HP as Skillman takes with him nearly 20 years of product design experience. At Palm, he was the man in charge of the design of the ill-fated but loved Pre.

On the eve of the Pre’s launch in 2009, Forbes ran a nice profile of Skillman and his team responsible for the device. “We wanted to build something really soft and precious yet robust that would be very different from the hard, pragmatic products in the market,” he said of the Pre at the time. While the Pre never became the success that Palm had hoped, it’s hard to knock its design (well, aside from the cramped physical keyboard), or its webOS operating system (which HP is focusing on going forward).

The Forbes piece also singled out three other men in charge of the Pre: Mike Bell, Matias Duarte, and Michael Abbott. Abbott (who headed up webOS) left Palm to join Twitter in April. In May, Duarte (who headed up webOS design work) left for Google to work on Android. And last month, Bell (who was VP of Product Development) left to join Intel. Yes, all four men profiled in that piece are now gone.

And that should hardly be surprising, given that a few months ago we reported on rumors of a mass exodus of executives from Palm as the HP deal neared completion. The exodus is now in full swing.

Of course, one of the few executives who hasn’t left Palm/HP at this point is former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein. While there were rumors of his departure months ago as well, it would seem that Rubinstein was an important part of the HP deal — a place where he started his career. And while it seems pretty unlikely that he’ll be tapped to be the next HP CEO, his name is certainly out there.

At Palm, Rubinstein personally built the team consisting of the four aforementioned men to build the Pre. ”It’s like the chains have been cut off, and we can do all these amazing things,” Skillman told Forbes about his Pre team last year.

They certainly can, but not at Palm or HP.

More: Who Is Left At Palm? Hint: Not Execs Katie Mitic Or Jeff Zwerner

As we wrote earlier this morning, Twitter seems to be aggressively hiring. Perhaps it’s this awesome Rushmore-inspired “Meet The Class Of Twitter HQ” video compelling people to join the flock?

Highlights: The “sudo make me a website” command, the footage of actual Twitter employees cutting and pasting tweets representing “Research” as well as the people just staring into their phones for “Mobile.”

Noticeably absent from the recruitment video is the Twitter executive team.

Here’s the Wes Anderson version below in case anyone wanted to compare. Or apply.

Update: A Twitter representative explains the dearth of executives.

“The employees are the stars at Twitter, and that’s who we focused on in the video (which was conceived, scripted and directed by employees). There wasn’t time to show everyone in the spot, so not every team is covered (no communications team, either).”

Remember how back during the Antennagate press conference, Steve Jobs explained that all smartphones have an Achilles Heel known as their antenna? Oh sure, we all rolled our eyes and then oohed and aahed when we learned we’d get bumpers. Well guess what… Jobs was right. Again. And now, courtesy of Tawkon we’ve got the proof.

First, a quick recap. Tawkon is an Israeli company that developed a radiation measurement app. Once installed, the app provides an indication of the current rate of cellular radiation emitted by the cellphone in-hand. From our original review:

The purpose of Tawkon's app is to provide the user with an indication—or "prediction" as they call it—of the radiation level being emitted by the iPhone. This level changes based on environmental conditions, distance from cell towers, and even the manner in which the device is held. To illustrate: the iPhone's antenna is located at the bottom of the device. If the user cradles the phone too tightly in the palm, the antenna has to work harder, thereby increasing radiation.

Tawkon wanted to debut its technology in an iPhone app, but couldn’t get it approved in the App Store. To their surprise, they were invited by Apple to visit the Cupertino HQ where they had meetings characterized as “positive” by Tawkon’s CEO, Gil Friedlander. App Store approval is yet to be achieved.

Tawkon has continued to plug-ahead, releasing a Blackberry app (download here). An Android version is in development.

Now that everyone is up to speed, let’s get back to the issue at hand: Proof that the death grip is real.

Tawkon produced the video below in which it’s clearly demonstrates that when the iPhone 4, the Blackberry Bold, and the Nexus One are held in the death-grip style, all three handset antennas are impacted. As the video shows, the result is that each of the three handsets compensates for the death-grip’s impact by increasing its cellular broadcast levels to a range that Tawkon considers ‘High’.

Too late to save Papermaster’s job, but the proof is in the pudding. I mean, the cellular radiation emissions.





Chicago-based startup TransFS has raised $510,000 in new funding from Hyde Park Angels and Silicon Valley angel investor Dave McClure’s recently launched investment fund 500Startups.

TransFS, which we wrote about here at the startup’s launch last year, is a comparison shopping site for credit card processors. The startup aims to help merchants save money on credit card fees and also conducts reverse auctions to solicit competing bids from credit card processing companies.

On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant's current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.

Once a merchant submit the form, their "auction" will begin. They will be presented with a series of competing bids from credit card processing companies and can review each proposal and select the bid that saves the most money. Bids are presented side by side to help users compare offers more easily and and gives users ratings, reviews, explanation of the terms of the contracts and a detailed financial savings analysis and comparison. It's a fairly simple and transparent process.

In the future, TransFS aims to replicate for businesses what BillShrink has done for consumers. The startup is expanding to comparison shopping services for payroll procssing, employee health insurance plans, and more. It essentially wants to be a one-stop-shop for any services that businesses may need.

Apple has purchased worldwide exclusive rights to use materials developed by LiquidMetal, a company you may remember from the demonstration video that made the viral rounds some time back. It featured a ball of steel bouncing on one of their special alloys for substantially longer than on steel or titanium — demonstrating how far superior the LiquidMetal was at retaining kinetic energy. I don’t think Apple is interested in creating an iBall (Bounce Different); this purchase is prescient for other reasons.

One of the most basic attractions to the Apple brand is that their products are very different from their competitors. Not, of course, in any real ways — the level of similarity between Macs and PCs really makes the whole conflict absurd — but in ways that are nonetheless obvious to the average user. The design and build of their products is one of the most important planks in their platform, and the purchase of LiquidMetals reaffirms that.

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