Over the last month, you may have seen some of the reports that Google’s search results are overloaded with spam. This isn’t a new phenomenon (for years now I’ve been tearing my hair out whenever I try to find a manufacturer instruction manual online), but people are noticing that it’s getting worse. Fortunately, Google seems to be listening.

Today Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s search quality team, has written a blog post stating that there has indeed been a “slight uptick of spam in recent months”, and he details what Google is doing to fix it.

First Cutts goes into some of the tweaks Google is making to its algorithms to specifically address the recent increase in spammy results:

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We've also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010.

But Google isn’t going to stop there. Now, finally, it sounds like they’re going to do more to take on sites that just repurpose content from other sites (hopefully including the countless sites that repost TechCrunch articles verbatim):

And we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content.

The most interesting part of the blog post is Cutts’s discussion of so-called “content farms” — those sites that consist primarily of low quality content, typically produced specifically because it will rank well in search results. It’s not clear if this would impact ‘professional’ content farms (like Associated Content and Demand Media) or if it’s going for smaller-time outlets, but it could be a big deal.

As "pure webspam" has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to "content farms," which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

Cutts does say a few things to defend Google’s search quality. For one, he says that English-language web spam is appearing in results less than half as often as it was five years ago. He also notes that, despite some theories to the contrary, Google will take action against spammy sites that feature Google ads (the theory goes that Google makes money from these ad-loaded content farms, so it isn’t incentivized to remove them).

It’s no secret that Q&A site Quora is exploding in terms of usage and growth. Currently the site is getting around 164,000 unique visitors per month (December 2010 stats from comScore), and we’ve heard from a source that the service is doubling users every four months. The drawback to that kind of growth is that content could suffer in return (i.e. the Yahoo Answers issue). While Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever has alluded to some of the ways that the company is planning to mitigate this issue, he recently went into more detail about these initiatives in a new Quora post titled ‘Scaling Up.’

Cheever writes that the startup is working on several new projects to support to new users, moderate massive influxes of content and to help the site scale. One of the most interesting projects he mentioned was that the company is currently developing an algorithm to determine user quality, which will be a huge addition in terms of technology. Here’s what Cheever wrote:

We’re developing an algorithm to determine user quality. The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it’s not exactly the same problem. We’ll use this to help decide what to show in feeds, when to send notifications, and how to rank answers.

While a huge endeavor in terms of development,it makes total sense for Quora develop a PageRank-like technology to rank people and content on the site. For those of you who don’t know this, PageRank is the link analysis algorithm was developed by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that is the technological foundation for Google Search.

Cheever says that the startup is also working to get more people to help evaluate the quality of new content on the site, effectively crowdsourcing moderation on Quora. He adds: Most of the people who use Quora have pretty good judgement, and we believe there is some wisdom in crowds. Preliminarily, this approach is very promising.

And education is another key part of helping Quora scale, says Cheever. He asserts if new users understand what Quora is when the join, that will help influence users to add appropriate content to the site. For example, Quora has added a brief tutorial quiz before new users add new questions and Cheever says that it has made a big difference in reducing the number of questions that don’t meet guidelines or policies.

He adds that Quora is working a number of other ways to improve the site and mitigate growth.

If Quora is able to develop a ‘PeopleRank’ algorithm that works and can scale, this could no doubt be a very important piece of technology generally. And a patented algorithm will certainly make the startup even more of a desirable acquisition target.

Hat tip to Shervin Pishevar for coining PeopleRank.

With the Crunchies later tonight, TechCrunchHQ is a bit of a mad house today. Paul Carr and I are MC’ing, so we’ve got interns sorting M&Ms by color, per our rider, while we try to figure out the line between “Oh that’s a funny joke” and “you’re fired.” Laura is polishing Monkey statues. Heather is counting and recounting and counting votes again. There are so many flowers and gift baskets from hopeful nominees, we can barely walk through the office. And at noon today the TechCrunchTV studio will be ripped asunder so the cameras can go to the Palace of the Fine Arts for comprehensive Crunchies coverage.

That gives us just enough time to do this week’s episode of Ask a VC, starring George Zachary of CRV. Zachary’s investments include Twitter, Yammer and Crunchies nominee Millenial Media. Zachary is deeply connecting in the industry and can regale you with stories about working with everyone from the iconic Jim Clark to Elon Musk to Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. He also spent some time in Hollywood producing movies with other ex-PayPalers, so questions about the Hollywood-Silicon Valley cold war are fair game too.

We film in just two hours so get your questions in NOW to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com

 

Next Giant Leap in Boulder, Colorado— a startup that’s making robots that will land and hop around on the surfaces of other planets in order to gather data, detect resources valuable to humans, and more — attained a $1 million grant from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, to advance their technology and pursue the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize in 2012, the companies revealed today.

Draper is a non-profit in Cambridge, Massachusetts that develops advanced technology, and assists and invests in others’ innovation for space, air, land and sea exploration. One of Next Giant Leap’s team members, Seamus Tuohy (also Draper's director of space systems) explained what NGL is working on and its potential uses:

“We’re developing critical technology for landing and hopping, both to satisfy the rules for the Google Lunar X Prize, and to provide an innovative, regional-scale science measurement capability. Unlike rovers that go to a single point on the surface of a planet, and then maybe two kilometers away and back, retreating if something is in the way, these would land, then ascend a bit, do a translation, traverse above the terrain to land in another spot. The lander-hopper we’re building is about the size of a coffee table, not a car.

I believe this would be particularly valuable to the environmental cause. The future ability to monitor the environment is a government concern, but who’s to say the best technology and services to measure greenhouse gases, and other things might not come from a commercial enterprise like Next Giant Leap? These technologies we’re working on let you place sensors, gather samples from difficult-to-access locations on the moon, and on earth as well where you don’t want to send a manned vehicle or a helicopter.”

Another team member with NGL, Todd J. Mosher, a program manager at Sierra Nevada Corporation, said potential buyers of NGL’s lander technology could include NASA as an anchor, and a number private sector companies that look at the moon as the next Gold Rush site, full of untapped water and mineral resources that are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive on earth.

Mosher and Tuohy envision NASA using NGL’s landers in “operations-to-station” and “commercial crew development” programs, bringing people and their supplies to the surface of the moon and back, or in scientific investigations. NASA, however, is not in the practice of mining other planets for resources Mosher noted. Beyond government missions, he explained, his team’s lander technology and more so, competitions like the Google Lunar X Prize, could have a huge impact on clean energy, water and minerals trade:

“My kids are doing an explorers’ segment in school right now, studying Magellan, Ponce de Leon and those folks. If you study that history, the first wave of explorers were funded by the government. They went out and found places. The next waves were entrepreneurs and traders who turned scientific discoveries into something profitable. They may not be as glamorous, but what they did led to the development of trade routes that connected people, and allowed settlements that turned into great cultures.

NGL’s landers are robotic scouts or prospectors that will head out to new territories to discover forms of wealth for all of us. They depend on solar rays to get their power. So does a lot of space technology, actually. They’re part of the next wave that will make space exploration much more sustainable. They can also help us explore water deposits that are believed to be in cold traps, or craters on the surface of the moon that the sun doesn’t reach.

The competition is driving people to get together and figure things out. We may not solve this problem in our first mission, but we’re thinking about how to survive a lunar night, which is equivalent to 14 days on earth in darkness, if our vehicles and stations run on solar. If we develop something rugged and robust enough to work in that extreme environment, it will help us back here on earth.”

With this grant, the NGL team, led by founder Michael Joyce, has raised about $1.5 million, including an investment of $200,000 by the team’s founder Michael Joyce, a $100,000 from Jolted Media Group Ltd., a $30,000 grant from eSpace an incubator program for space startups, and $125,000 from Sierra Nevada Corporation.

A week ago, ZDNet ran a troubling story about that fact that one of its contributing bloggers, Bulgaria-native malware researcher Dancho Danchev, had gone missing since August 2010. His last blog post on ZDNet appeared on August 18, 2010, and his personal blog had last been updated three weeks later.

ZDNet stated that it had tried to contact them repeatedly, to no avail, and got in touch with Bulgarian CERT authorities to prompt an investigation into his sudden disappearance.

Well, good news: Danchev appears to be back online, safe and sound, judging by the recent activity on his Twitter account. From the looks of it, he’s already getting in touch with Larry Dignan, ZDNet Editor in Chief, as well as David Grober, Managing Editor of ZDNet Blogs.

Danchev tweets that he’ll be summarizing “everything that happened” in a blog post this weekend, although he adds that he won’t be able to disclose all details due to the sensitivity of his work. Either way, good to have you back, Dancho.

Amazon’s Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) is no more, at least not by that name. Starting today, the self-publishing program will be known as Kindle Direct Publishing.

With Kindle Direct Publishing, anyone can self-publish books on the Kindle Store, free of charge.

Since June 2010, authors can participate in a 70 percent royalty program and make books available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android devices.

Amazon today announced that it is extending that 70 percent royalty option to include books sold to Canadian customers. It was previously available only in the United States and the UK.

Pet Holdings, the company behind the Cheezburger Network – home to LOLcats, FAIL Blog, Totally Looks Like and other silliness – recently raised $30 million in funding.

You would think everything is smooth sailing for the company and its CEO Ben Huh, and that its employees are all shiny and happy people these days, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

This reveals a hard-hitting report by NMA.tv, the Taiwanese news organization also responsible for breaking the news about Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently throwing ninja stars at airport personnel and Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged love affair with actor Justin Timberlake.

According to the report, Huh is known to hit Pet Holdings employees, depicted as cats in order not to reveal their true identity, with a stick to make them create content faster.

Sometimes, he’ll even throw them in the trash can. Sensitive viewers, be advised.

This for a man who apparently, as we can see in the beginning of the video report, had to literally lick an investor’s kneecaps to secure his $30 million.

No wonder some people want to hit the ‘Flame’ button on him. Funny no moar.

Google is making a €1 million gift to the International Mathematical Olympiad organization, which has been organizing the annual World Championship Mathematics Competition for High School Students. The first IMO championship was held back in 1959, in Romania, with 7 countries participating. It has gradually expanded to over 100 countries from 5 continents. The donation will help the organization cover the costs of the next five global events (2011-2015), Google Director of Public Policy Simon Hampton writes in a company blog post.

With shares of Facebook recently hitting a $70 billion valuation in a private auction on SecondMarket, you’d think those are the only shares that trade on the private stock market Facebook did make up the biggest portion of trades (39%) in the fourth quarter of 2010, but the market for private shares is broad and demand is strong for all sort of shares from LinkedIn (7%) and Etsy (5%) to Chegg (2.5%)and Bloom Energy (2.5%). Last quarter, SecondMarket handled $158 million worth of private stock trades, a little more than double the $75 million worth in the third quarter. For the entire year, SecondMarket handled $400 million worth of private trades.

The number of venture funds, hedge funds, and wealthy individuals trading on SecondMarket also continues to rise, reaching about 35,000 cumulative participants since 2008. The growth in transactions, particularly in relation to Facebook, is drawing SEC scrutiny, but SecondMarket will continue to expand as long as tech companies won’t—or can’t—go public. You can read the full Q4 report here.

In terms of demand for shares, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Craigslist, and Groupon top the rankings. Rising stars include Dropbox, Chegg, and Flixter, as well as Clickable and Foursquare. There is more demand than there are shares,

Yesterday evening, Mozilla announced that it would be blocking the Skype toolbar add-on in all versions of its Firefox browser.

While this concerns an impending ‘soft block’, meaning users will be able to re-enable the add-on if they choose to do so, Skype is keen to point out users should always install the most recent version of its desktop client in order to avoid compatibility issues.

The VoIP company also says they’re sorry about the problems, and are diligently working with the Mozilla crew to iron out any remaining issues as fast as possible.

The Skype Toolbar for Firefox, which comes bundled with the Skype client, is a browser extension that detects phone numbers in Web pages and re-renders them as clickable buttons, cutting shorter the time it takes for people to call those numbers using the Skype app.

Mozilla claims the current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week alone and could potentially make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower (and thus significantly slow down the rendering of regular Web pages as well).

Skype’s official statement on the matter:

Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and we are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users.

Users can download the latest Skype client with the latest included Toolbars OR the latest toolbar installer itself is here.

More proof that RSS is on its way out, and the apocalypse is nigh: Google has seemingly replaced the top link to its RSS reader product, Google Reader, with a link to ‘Photos’ (Picasa) at the top of the Gmail web interface. To be clear, the link is still there, it’s just hidden behind the ‘More ▼’ link now.

Boy, that place has really started falling apart since Larry Page took over as CEO.

Sure, it’s a minor UI change, but that isn’t stopping users from going nuts about it on Twitter.

A couple of choice tweets:

Another user posits: “Where the F**k is my link to Google Reader in Gmail?!??! I’m sure they can see in Analytics that I use it every single day…”

And therein lies the problem, I think. You can customize Gmail to a degree, and – particularly for a free product – that’s really awesome, but you can’t yet change the order of the top menu items – and that’s what’s getting users riled up.

Maybe Google will listen to this vocal subset of users, maybe they won’t. But I think it may be better if we don’t wait to see what happens, and instead a TechCrunch-reading developer immediately starts coding a browser extension that puts the damn ‘Reader’ link back. Go!

San Francisco, CA

21st January 2011

Dear Michael Moore-Jones,

I just finished reading your thought-provoking post –  "A Future Without Personal History" – over at ReadWriteWeb and felt compelled to write you this note. I was particularly taken by your concern that your entire generation will grow up without ever having written and mailed a letter, and as such will leave no permanent record of their lives.

Hell, you know you're getting old when someone fifteen years younger than you is bitching about the state of the modern world.

Still, yours was an argument well presented; certainly better than I could have managed at the age of sixteen. And I was with you all the way. Or at least all the way up to your conclusion where you suggested a solution to the problem of guaranteeing a sustainable record of your life: "copying and pasting communication from all different formats into different documents stored both on hard drive and in the cloud.”

It’s on that point we part company.

In fact, if you really want to create the kind of historical paper trail your parents (and mine) will leave behind, you're going to have to do far more than simply copying and pasting your tweets and emails and saving them in the cloud.

For a start, trust me Michael, in fifteen years members of the Millennial generation will have many technological regrets, but one of them will not be a lack of personal history online. Data has a habit of sticking around, albeit in fragmented form, particularly when we don't want it to. Given the number of backups – and backups of backups – and copying and pasting and retweeting that goes on today, 2025's 30 year olds will live in a world where every detail of their life is recorded and archived somewhere in the cloud. Every underage drink or youthful indiscretion; every photo taken during their 10,957 days on earth; every SMS declaration of love and every piece of online trolling. It'll all be there – somewhere – just waiting to come back and bite them in the ass. Backing all of that up will just ensure that it's all easier to find.

But what it won't do is present a coherent personal history, any more than a million footsteps in the snow can adequately describe the journeys of the people who left them.

To blame the demise of physical letters is to conflate medium with message. The reason why people hold on to old love notes and take pleasure in reading the journals of those long dead is because, generally speaking, people who took the time to mail a letter or keep a private journal did so because they had something to say, a story to tell, love to declare or forgiveness to beg. You could print out every tweet that most people have ever written and the value of them wouldn't even approach that of a single line from Anne Frank's diary or one of Byron's – or Orwell's – letters.

And yet, Michael, for all your youthful conviction that every problem must have a technological solution, you remain fundamentally right. Our obsession with social media and email has resulted in a world in which most people have no interest in ensuring a lasting historical record of their lives. And it's a problem not just for your generation, but for mine and for my parents’ and for every generation that has access to computers and the Internet.

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and email, people of all ages have so many outlets for self-expression that they are left with neither the time nor inclination to collect their thoughts into a journal or even a letter. After all, why spend hours – even years – writing something for a far-off audience of one when you can spend seconds to reach an instant audience of hundreds, or thousands. The more we evolve away from the notion of deferred gratification, the more pronounced the problem will become.

And yet… The fact that the problem is largely attitudinal, rather than generational or technological points to a solution that is equally age-agnostic. Last year I decided to quit social media in order to focus more on blogging. In fact, shortly after I made that decision, I realised that moving back to blogging wasn’t the answer either – and not least because writing about my life for a wide audience is perilously close to being my day job.

Instead I resolved to use the time I would have spent tweeting and updating various statuses to keep a paper journal again. Not for profound thoughts or Bridget Jones bullshit, but rather as a sensible way to sift through the dozes of events of each day and record – with context – anything I might like to remember in future years.

Similarly, I've rediscovered the joy of letter writing. A useful side-effect of everyone using email and phone calls is that almost no-one receives letters in the mail any more. So when they do – no matter if the sender is a friend, a prospective lover or just some random shmuck – it stands out high above the noise. As a result, in the past months I've enjoyed correspondence with countless people who I wouldn't otherwise have been able to reach, and I've been reminded of the thrill of seeing familiar handwriting in my mailbox.

So, Michael, if you're serious about this whole personal history thing, I'd urge you to shut down your laptop for a few hours and pick up a pen. The rewards might not be quite as immediate as sending a tweet, but trust me when I say the long-term gains more than make up for it.

Oh, and if that isn't enough to convince you, please accept my assurance on one other thing. Chicks dig guys who send them letters.

Yours in anticipation of a bright future for the past,

Paul

…

P.S. Wear sunscreen

I'm a big fan of music streaming startup Rdio, but one thing it does not do (and probably never will): let me upload the music I already owned before I subscribed to their service so I can stream it on the go (it does have an iTunes syncing feature, but it's limited to the music they've licensed). Enter mSpot, a music locker service that does exactly that: let people carry around the music they've already paid for. And today, mSpot is formally launching in Europe.

Late last summer we were ready to break a big story – that Eric Schmidt would be stepping down as the CEO of Google. Multiple sources and all that jazz. The basic story was that he was tired (who wouldn’t be), and that the idea of competing, and probably losing battles, against Apple and Facebook for the next decade wasn’t all that appealing. Who would replace him? That was the rest of the article.

But Google insisted the story wasn’t accurate, wasn’t even close to accurate, and generally contained no accuracy whatsoever. We killed the story, since their denials seemed fairly straightforward and honest, and we found no other independent sources.

Knowing I’d be annoyed by today’s news that Eric Schmidt will be stepping down as CEO of Google most likely explains why Google offered to let talk to the Trinity – Larry, Sergey and Schimdt – this afternoon in the flesh. At least, I assume they were in the flesh on the other end of the phone.

The well rehearsed message coming from all three of them is that this is a good decision, it’s not a rushed decision, and it’s a decision based purely on what’s best for the company.

Schmidt stressed that Larry is ready to take the CEO position because for the last decade he, Sergey and Schmidt made all important decisions together. “The only difference is that Larry will get the credit and attention,” said Schmidt, saying that Larry is more than ready for the job. And Schmidt will certainly still be around as executive chairman in case things slip.

Schmidt also stressed on the phone that this is a good way to make Google more efficient. He said earlier in the day that they wanted to “simplify our management structure and speed up decision making.” I asked him for examples where slow decision making and/or a complicated management structure had hurt them in the past.

“There’s an example every hour,” he said

I also asked Schmidt how much of the decision was personal, since that’s what we heard over the summer. He pointed out that he isn’t stepping down, he’s “stepping up” and that he’ll now be able to focus more on big picture things for Google like “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.” He’ll still be an employee after the change, and he’ll still take his $1/year salary.

Schmidt responded similarly to my question about their 2008 statement to Fortune that the three would work together for twenty years. He’s still part of the team, and they’re all still working together.

Words aside, this is clearly Schmidt taking a much smaller role at Google. And there’s nothing wrong with that given the decade he just finished off. “No one in the universe could have done a better job as CEO of Google,” Larry said early in the interview.

Few people would disagree. But that doesn’t mean Schmidt wants to fight the same fight over the next decade. Eating Microsoft’s lunch may have been the salad days for Google. Now they’re fighting dual wars with Apple and Facebook, and the odds, in my opinion, aren’t completely in their favor.

Read more about the story here.

You may be noticing a trend: there are a lot of startups looking to mimic the easy-to-use development platform that made Heroku a hit with Ruby developers and offer a similar solution for use with other languages. In the last few weeks alone we’ve written about PHP Fog (which, as you’d guess, focuses on PHP) and dotCloud (which aims to support a variety of languages). And today we’ve got one more: AppHarbor, a ‘Heroku for .NET’. The company is funded by Y Combinator, and it’s launching today.

AppHarbor will be going up against Microsoft Azure, a platform that developers can use to deploy their code directly from Visual Studio. But co-founder Michael Friis says that Azure has a few issues. For one, it uses Microsoft’s own database system, which can lead to developer lock-in. And it also doesn’t support Git, which many developers prefer to use for collaboration and code deployment.

Other features: AppHarbor has automated unit testing, which developers can run before any code gets deployed (this reduces the chance that they’ll carelessly deploy something that breaks their site). The service also says that it takes 15 seconds to deploy code, rather than the fifteen minute wait seen on Azure.

Friis acknowledges that there are a few potential hurdles. For one, some .NET developers may be used to life without Git, so it may take some work to get them interested (Mercurial support is on the way, which many .NET developers already use, so this may not be a big deal). There’s also going to be competition for the small team, which currently includes Friis, Rune Sørensen and Troels Thomsen.

AppHarbor is first to launch, but there will be others: Meerkatalyst and Moncai are both planning to tackle the same problem, and they won’t be the last.

A report on Mashable shows that Google will be imminently launching a Groupon clone, called Google Offers. By the look of the documents they have received from a source this product seems like it would be your run of the mill Groupon clone, “A Google Offer is a daily deal that enables subscribers to pre-purchase products and services at an attractive discount.” Ha.

Sean McCann adds another piece of the puzzle with a Google hosted Google offers logo, of the URL https://www.google.com/images/logos/offers_logo.gif. It matches the one in the document below. The 404 page for http://google.com/offers is also graphically unique from those of http://google.com/test and http://google.com/deals, which both land on similar pages.

Last time the search giant attempted a foray into the deals space, it reportedly offered Groupon itself $6 billion for an acquisition. Groupon didn’t bite and looks to be progressing towards an IPO at a $15 billion valuation.

I’ve contacted Google for a confirmation and will update this post when they respond.

Update: Google confirms that this is indeed their Groupon clone in a statement to Search Engine Land.

“Google is communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and  participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program. This  initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses with  customers in new ways. We do not have more details to share at this time, but will keep you posted.”

Well that didn’t take long. Here it is, the first Verizon iPhone commercial.

As you can see, the focus is on clock — the first one on 11:59 — implying that people in all different walks of life are waiting for something. There’s the noise of a click constantly ticking in the background as a low hum becomes a louder hum.

Then the voice over: “To our millions of customers, who never stopped believing this day would come…”  The clock strikes 12. A girl smiles. “Thank you.” Cue the iPhone 4 logo. Cue the Verizon logo. Cue the launch date: 2.10.11. And then the new tagline: “It Begins”.

As expected, there’s nothing about Android. Nor is there anything about AT&T. It’s only about the iPhone. And Verizon. Together.

We read a lot of news about amazing companies when they receive financing, have a change in leadership or launch new products, but we rarely get a glimpse into the companies and people that use those products and tools in incredibly meaningful ways. This week’s Speaking Of… is with Roxy owner Nic Alder, son of Lou Adler who’s famous for producing bands/acts such as Cheech and Chong, The Mamas and the Papas and films such as Up In Smoke and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Lou Adler is also the creator of the Roxy nightclub that Nic now runs and operates.

The Roxy is a 37 year old international brand that was born the same year as Nic and has been the destination for legendary bands through the decades. Nic grew up around musical legends such as Bob Marley, Guns and Roses, etc. and when he took over the club, he had a very different vision for how it should operate. Lou ran a very successful club using traditional promotional tools, but the club was eventually displaced by bigger and hotter venues in different parts of Hollywood and deeply impacted by the move of consumers searching for how to spend their time using Internet tools and ditching old media.

Even though Nic’s father was a naysayer and didn’t approve of Nic’s new ways of operating the business, Nic forged ahead and eventually his father came around once he saw the results. There’s no denying that Nic was correct in changing everything, because if it wasn’t for social media, the Roxy would no longer exist.

Now, I hate the word social media and really, the word social, because it is so overused. When I hear someone say they are a social media “expert”, I vomit in my mouth a little. However, The Roxy is a strong example of how focusing on making your venue/business social really can work and is absolutely necessary in order to be relevant in today’s fast moving world. Nic says that social media, to him, is a mirror of how your business is performing. It isn’t all about reaching out. He’s learned more about his business through real time interaction than he ever could have before. He places so much importance on this as part of his business that he’s hired Kyra Reed, co-founder of Markyr Media, and several other team members who’s sole job is to interact and build meaningful relationships with fans + customers.

Nic’s openness for embracing new widgets, applications and tools actually shocked me. He’ll throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks and he’s hoping more and more startups develop tools that he can put to use in the club. Nic is also thinking about coming to the Bay Area to host a Roxy Presents event where he brings in an awesome band and listens to startups pitch him on ideas. The top idea that wins would get a chance to be featured in his club. If this interests you, please let us know in the comments and we’ll pass it along.

The Roxy was the first venue of its type to use Groupon and they were pretty excited with the results, but experienced some backlash from some of the music community when they did it, but his experiments turned out to be a huge success, drawing in more customers and ultimately benefiting the bands. The venue has almost 140k fans on Facebook and 53k fans on Twitter (the most fans/followers for a venue of their kind online). This is a small number for a famous person or a big brand, but for a venue this is an astronomical number, especially when you consider the club’s capacity is 500 people.

This fan base they were able to build isn’t just local. It’s global and it caught the attention of Facebook. They published a case study this week to show how effective their ad campaigns have been. The community they have built has absolutely changed how they do business and most importantly, has made them profitable and sustainable once again.

I went down to LA to get a tour of the Roxy and was invited on a journey through what they call the “Social Strip”, which is a group of businesses that have banded together in order to help one another. You might think, “ahh, well, isn’t that nice?!”, well, it is, but business traditionally wasn’t done that way. The businesses on the Sunset Strip saw themselves as competition and refused to work with one another. What changed? Well, Twitter changed them.

The Roxy was the first to come online and they did one simple act that changed the history of entertainment venues on the Sunset Strip. They said hello and welcomed a fellow club when they started their Twitter account and gave them a shout out and a retweet. They started being social online with their neighbors. Eventually, they all met in person and shared their financial woes and banded together to help one another. Businesses in the Sunset Strip coalition include the world renowned 200 person venue The Viper Room, The Comedy Store and House of Blues and they are adding new businesses every month. When one venue is closed, they cross-promote the other venue and so on, which ultimately increases the happiness of their shared customer base.

The Sunset Strip almost died, but now people travel across town to experience a night of fun at these venues and we have Nic Adler’s determination and faith in Twitter, Facebook, Groupon and Topspin to thank. He put 3 years of continuous effort into using these tools, even when early signs didn’t pay off and eventually reached a tipping point that saved his business. Pretty cool and I think you’ll enjoy the interview with Nic Adler and Kyra Reed below:

“For example, men tend to cite themselves as the primary reason for success, while women tend to cite external factors.” — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

“Female Tech influencers are sure to cross their ts and their legs.” — WPromote Infographic

There was an extremely newsworthy Google earnings call at 1:30 pm today and I’d like to write about some startups at some point before the day ends so I’m not going to waste too much time with this one. But here you go before I forget, an infographic about women in tech that is pink, includes images of Sarah Palin, Paris Hilton, porn star Jenna Jameson and Snooki, and asks hard-hitting questions like “What’s your must-have bag?” and “Who is your dream man?”

Ostensibly this is holding up Google’s Marissa Mayer, Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, PR consultant Sarah Evans and Net -A- Porter CEO  Natalie Massenet as female technology career role models (you can follow the flow chart to see which one you should emulate) and indeed they are.

But how does “What hairstyle do you prefer?” have anything to do with technology? Imagine asking this question to Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or  Jack Dorsey from Square (who is, admittedly, fashion forward).

My biggest problem with this is that it makes what must have been years of grueling achievement look so ephemeral, “You are living proof that the right idea (mixed with the right outfit) …”CES, SXSW, AVN (?) or NY Fashion Week?” From experience, being a woman in this industry means a ton of being passed over for stuff, condescended to and if you are eventually successful, disliked. It’s no “Sex And The City.”

The women who have been highlighted here are smart , driven and have worked hard for their success. They deserve so much more than being reduced to an infographic bobble-head on a cartoon body.

And in case anyone was wondering, I am “Caroline McCarthy.”

Click image for a larger version.

If you’ve ever had to test an unreleased iPhone application or wanted to test yours with real world users, you’ll know what a pain it is. The UDID thing is bad enough, but the process of having to drag and drop .ipa and provisioning files to the copy of iTunes on the computer you sync with is ridiculous. Why on Earth can’t you do this over the air? That’s exactly what TestFlight brings to the table.

The service provides an over-the-air app installation solution that is massively easier to use than the current iTunes sync model. How do I know? I’ve actually used it. Before we heard about their launch today, I used TestFlight to test another startup’s iPhone app. I was blown away by how simple the process was. I immediately wished all startups would use this solution.

Obviously, TestFlight hopes all customers have the same reaction I did. And the truth is that many others already have. In their testing phase, companies like Posterous, Twitter, and Icon Factory have used their solution to try out new versions of their apps.

Beyond simple over-the-air installation, another big plus to TestFlight is that you can group testers together to serve them up different versions of your app. So, for example, if you want people in your company to see one version, but investors to have another, you can easily do that. And you can track the stats for each. There’s also a “recruitment” feature to allow devs to find potential testers if they’re looking for more.

All of this is still subject to Apple’s device testing limits (which is why the UDID is still needed), but again, TestFlight makes the process so much better. And naturally, it works for the iPad and iPod touch as well.

While the service is free to developers who want to try it, there will also be an enterprise version that they plan to charge for. That pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but co-founder Ben Satterfield tells us it will include installable licensed versions plus other to be determined features.

For the last two and a half years we’ve been tracking the progress of Life360, a startup that looks to help you keep your family safer by offering a variety of tools, like protection against identify theft and an alert system to monitor for sex offenders in your neighborhood. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to go viral. Except that’s what just happened.

Recently, Life360 has been adding over 10,000 families per day — it just set a new record last week, with 72,000 family signups. In total, it is approaching 1 million registered families, 363,000 of whom were active last month. And these are families we’re talking about — the absolute number of downloads is higher.

So what’s driving the growth?

The sudden boost in press attention has helped. Life360 has recently been profiled in a number of newspapers and on CNN. And the messaging hasn’t been focused on making it sound appealing to technophiles — Hulls says that it’s middle America families that are really latching onto the service. Parents, it seems, like the notion of turning their child’s new smartphone into something that can make them safer.

The other catalyst has been a relatively minor tweak in the application’s UI. Life360′s mobile applications on Android and iPhone have offered a ‘Panic’ button for some time — if a child hits it, their parent will immediately receive a message via push notification, SMS, or email. Life360 kept that functionality, but it recently changed the name of the button to a less alarming “Check In”, and things have taken off from there.

Hulls says that parents, as you’d expect, like the peace of mind of knowing that their children are safe. But kids aren’t big fans of the Big Brother approach of constant location tracking, and the check-in system is a compromise. Parents simply tell their kids to ‘check-in’ via the Life360 app every so often — it only takes one tap, so it’s less of a hassle than sending a text message. When the child checks in the parent receives a notification with their GPS coordinates. And parents are apparently telling each other that they’re happy with the system, which is driving further growth.

The Check In feature still has some room for improvement: it doesn’t actually associate the coordinates with a nearby venue, and there isn’t a text field for the child to explain where they are (Hulls says that this increases the friction, so kids are less likely to check-in). But he says that even without this context, many parents are happy that they’re getting the digital equivalent of a thumbs up from their child. And there’s a new version being released next week that adds additional features.

Finally, there’s been one last key to the sudden surge in growth: Life360′s mobile apps are free. Previously the startup had more of a focus on its premium services (which include offering GPS-equipped hardware for keeping tabs on your children, an alert system that can monitor if sex offenders are moving to your area, and so on). Now the focus is on getting distribution with the free mobile application, with plans to upsell these premium services, and other new ones, down the line.

Life360 has raised a total of $1.5 million, and is in the process of raising another round of funding. Other services that also look to help parents keep tabs on their children include AT&T’s FamilyMap (powered by Location Labs and Whereoscope.

Postling, a New York City startup that makes a social media dashboard for small business owners, has attracted another $350,000 in seed financing through the services provided by a San Francisco startup, AngelList.

Postling chief executive, David Lifson, said it was his fourth time “going out” on AngelList, a networking site that matches startups to potential backers. Postling was the second company to ever get funded on AngelList, and Lifson is now a volunteer “scout” in New York City, encouraging other entrpreneurs to use it.

Postling’s six, full-time employees work mostly in offices within the New York City co-work space, General Assemb.ly. With this round, Postling’s total number of investors rises to 24, and its total amount of seed money raised hits $700,000. New investors included: Mark Goines, Peter Lehrman and Mark Birch.

Lifson says his company will use the capital to hire developers, work on new features and keep things running smoothly while he seeks a round of venture funding. He says he’s looking for a $3 million series A.

Postling recently introduced a feature that lets small business owners get notified by e-mail when someone comments on their business related social media accounts, including the wall of their Facebook-business page (a service Facebook, surprisingly hadn’t offered its business users), WordPress blogs, Youtube channels, Yelp pages and more.

Small business clients of Postling include Midtown Comics in Times Square, Paragon Sports in Union Square and Butter Lane cupcakes in the East Village in Manhattan. The startup has some larger clients, too including Nine West and Lexmark.

Since early 2010, Postling’s revenue increased eight times and is now in the tens of thousands range, a meaningful number for an early startup, he remarked. Postling also boasts about 21,000 registered users representing some 10,000 businesses, including sole practitioners from bloggers to plumbers and doctors. Forty percent of the companies using Postling have a brick-and-mortar business.

Lifson also discussed his long-term vision with TechCrunch, saying:

“A lot of people compare us to Hootsuite which I've been puzzled by… In our minds we're designing for the small business owner who spends all day away from the computer, helping patients, running a restaurant and only has five minutes a day to do social media marketing.

We really look up to Mint and Intuit. And we have this whole idea of drilling down into the real problems for real people instead of building fancy things for fancy people. Long term, we'll be about more than social media.

We want to be a unified marketing dashboard for businesses. Anywhere they spend time on [digital] marketing we want them to come to their Postling dashboard and do it from there.
Maybe they can manage deals they create and distribute, email marketing or more.

Everyone sorta knows there's probably only one or two sites a small business owner will visit every day. We will be one of those two sites.”

When Apple announced their Q1 2011 numbers on Tuesday, Apple’s Tim Cook made an interesting comment about what Apple plans to do with their massive, nearly $60 billion, war chest of cash. Apple will do the same for some ‘secret’ components, which is not dissimilar to the time that Apple bought all the flash memory. We think we might know what the secret is and here’s why.

When Tim Cook was talking on the conference call, he stated that “we’ve historically entered into agreements with others to supply; largest one was with flash memory suppliers back in 2005 that totaled over a $1 billion, because flash would become increasingly important across product line and industry.” And because of that Apple became the largest consumers of flash memory, at the time for use in iPods. Cook later commented that the ‘secret’ deal is just like the flash deal, that it is “focused in an area that we feel is very strategic.” Cook wouldn’t say just what because of competitive advantage. So what could the next strategy be?

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We’re still digesting the huge news today that co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO of Google on April 4. It’s a move that no one saw coming — or did they? After reading over his statements and listening to his comments during the earnings calls, Schmidt does give some insight into the move.

Most notably, Schmidt says that he got together with Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin over the holidays to figure out how to best run the company going forward. In other words, this decision was made very recently, and hasn’t been a long-time coming. But why now? It’s pretty clear from Schmidt’s comments (as well as Page’s) that there was a feeling that Google has been moving too slowly recently. Specifically, Schmidt notes discussions the three have had about “how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making.”

“For the last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there's clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company,” Schmidt continues. In other words, he seems to be saying that while he was CEO, it was really a joint effort among the three to run the company. And now, in order to move quicker, they need one leader to make the decisions. And that will be Page.

While Schmidt gave no indication that he was upset about the move (and he went out of his way several times to talk about his excitement about his new role and his continued relationship Brin and Page), this is clearly Schmidt being removed from power. And again, it appears to be because things just weren’t getting done they way the company would have liked.

That brings me back to this piece I wrote about some of Google’s recent missteps. While publicly, some Googlers took issue with what I had to say, privately, a number reached out in agreement. There has been a feeling within Google of a lack of execution, among some I’ve spoken with. So perhaps today’s news shouldn’t be all that surprising.

And along those same lines, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that Brin himself has taken control of Google’s social efforts, as we reported in December. Schmidt alluded to this fact today on the earnings call, when a question came up about social. Schmidt noted that Brin should take it as it’s a big part of what he’s working on. And Brin himself noted that there are “several new products” he’s working on, but would’t disclose them for fear that they may be called “vaporware” (a reference to Apple COO Tim Cook’s comment from yesterday about Android tablets).

To be fair, Schmidt has clearly been bogged down in recent months by all types of high-level stuff as Google has been under increased scrutiny from this government and others and their power grows. Now his job will apparently be to just deal with those things, and let Page run the day-to-day without having to worry about much of that. How well that will work, of course, remains to be seen.

Schmidt closed his portion of the Q&A by saying that while it has been a “great privilege” to be CEO for 10 years, and that a decade is a long time for anyone to be CEO. “I'm looking forward to working with my best friends, Larry and Sergey,” he said in closing. Just not as closely as they had been, apparently. It’s time to put the pedal to the metal.

With the news that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is stepping down and founder Larry Page is taking over in the role, both gentleman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the earnings call to address questions from analysts. One analyst asked about what Google’s plans were with incorporating more social elements into the business. Schmidt deferred to Brin, saying that this was an area that Brin has been working on, which we knew from previous reports.

Brin said that the notion of realtime and social are both important to search, and the company has worked to make search for realtime and to include social elements within search such as integration with Twitter in results. But he added that there would be much more to come, saying that “we’ve only touched one percent of what” social can be within search.

So clearly 2011 is going to be the year that Google really pushes social. On the call, Brin said that he’s working on some new projects at the company that he couldn’t name. Clearly all of this seems to point to the fact that Brin is leading Google’s social plans. And that Brin thinks that Google has only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social.