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Is Google’s Mobile Loss in China Kai-fu Lee’s Gain?
Former head of Google China Kai-fu Lee insists—insists—that he is not happy that Google imploded its business in China. “Seeing the work that I put in, how could I be happy to see that?” he says. In fact, in a press release all about his incubator's companies being built on top of Android he doesn’t use the G-word once. “Given the pull out, we’ll accept the situation and do our best,” he says humbly. Yeah, accept the situation like a fox.
As Lee begins to open up more about the types of companies being created at his incubator, Innovation Works, there’s a consistent theme—Android. Whether it’s address books, music programs, video games, maps, eCommerce marketplaces or e-readers, many of Lee’s companies are hoping to take advantage of the good things about Android—namely that it’s a free, robust operating system—but customize the core smartphone applications in a way that Google won’t or can’t.
It’s interesting that I had a conversation with Lee about this topic right about the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was delivering a keynote touting that more than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated daily, going beyond just the smartphone wielding “elite.” Lee would agree with everything his former boss said. It’s just that Google isn’t well positioned to make money off the apps and services in the world’s largest market. Oops.
Google Updates The Doodle Again; Points To Live-Updating Results
The ongoing saga of Google's logo continues. The search giant has just changed the doodle on google.com once again this evening, leading up to their search event tomorrow. And once again, it looks as if the logo points to what they'll be announcing tomorrow.
Whereas yesterday, the doodle was more kinetic, which Google called "fast, fun and interactive," today's logo updates as you type in the search box. This points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they've been testing.
50 Days Of Logos? All We Can Take Is 1 Day Of Logos.
Well, power to the people, I guess. Yesterday we announced quite innocently that we'd be changing our logo every day for 50 days to salute a different startup. We thought it would be fun based on doing it last week with an old Twitter logo.
Fun it was not. Reddit, it seems, has been doing exactly the same thing for the last eight days. Within moments of our post going up we were slammed for copying them. And then demands were made that we stop, and/or give them credit for inventing the silly idea. I scoffed, and then things went crazy. We get more than our fair share of crazies in our comments, but this was over the top even in our experience. We banned dozens of hateful comments, but they're coming faster than we can stop them. And I certainly have no intention of doing this day after day as each new logo goes up.
Firefox 4 Beta, Now With Faster Graphics And Visual Sound
Firefox just launched its fifth Firefox 4 beta, which includes a more streamlined interface, faster graphics and a new audio API that exposes raw audio data.
What's new in this latest iteration of Firefox?
* The introduction of an audio API which uses HTML5, allowing developers to visualize sound data in a browser, creating novel ways to experience sound while web surfing.
* Emphasis on speed of graphics load with default graphics support from Direct2D, a 2-D graphics API for Windows 7, on machines that support Windows 7.
* Implementation of the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a security protocol that increases the chances for a secure connections.
A stable alpha version is set to be released by Mozilla in November. You can try out the latest beta here.
Yahoo!’s User Interface Library Learns To Love Being Touched, Gestured At
Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they'll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren't going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go.
Today Yahoo! is looking to make things a bit less painful with the latest release of their open-source User Interface library, YUI.
Still Think The iTunes 10 Icon Sucks? Our Ten Reader Alternatives
Is it just me or has there been a lot of logo hate going around lately? Apparently hell hath no fury like an armchair graphic designer scorned, if you go by some of the comments on our "Hate The iTunes 10 Logo? Think You Can Do Better?" post. Along with haters doing what they do best (hint: it's hating) we also got a ton of alternative submissions. Here are ten of the most noteworthy above. And in case you want to switch the current iTunes 10 logo out, here's how to do it on a Mac and on a PC. 
The New iPod Order: Click Wheel Dethroned, Touch Screen Crowned
I remember my first iPod very well. Shockingly, I was a little late to the party, waiting until the fourth generation iPod (now called the “iPod classic”) in 2004 to join the revolution. And I only bought one because I was planning to drive out to California (from Ohio) and I wanted enough music storage to last me the entire trip. I remember unboxing it and thinking: “wow, I can store all my music on this tiny device?”
Today, six years later, I still have that old iPod. But I no longer consider it “tiny.” In fact, it’s more of a “brick” both in size and weight. It held 40 gigabytes of my music on its miniature hard drive platters. Today, the latest high-end iPod touch holds 24 more gigabytes and is a sliver of the size and a fraction of the weight. And it plays music for 28 more consecutive hours. Oh, and it has a color screen. One you can touch. One you can multi-touch.
Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital Adds $20 Million To Its Coffers
According to recent SEC filings, it appears that Chris Sacca's newly launched fund, Lowercase Capital, has raised over $20 million in funding. Under the name Lowercase Industry Fund, Sacca has quietly raised over $11 million in a filing from early August and $10 million in a filing from June. It's unclear who the investors are from the SEC filings.
This funding adds to Lowercase Capital's $8.5 million raised earlier this year at the launch of the angel fund. Some of the fund's previous investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits. And Lowercase has been on an investment roll lately, participating in a number of recent rounds in hot startups, including Embed.ly, Chartbeat, and Backupify. 
Exclusive: Digg’s Lunch Menu And A Terrible Hot Dog Scaling Solution
Apparently some of Digg's employees aren't super happy that their main source of news about Digg is TechCrunch - probably referring to the news that VP of Engineering John Quinn is out.
Digg Designer Danny Trinh Twitters "I love finding out about @digg company news via @techcrunch. Wonder if they'll post our lunch menu too.."
Yes, we will.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Rips “Vindictive” HP Lawsuit
The dramatic battle between Mark Hurd, HP, and Oracle continues. Yesterday Oracle announced that it was hiring recently-ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd as Co-President and a member of its Board. HP responded this morning by suing Hurd, alleging that he would potentially leak trade secrets to Oracle. Oracle has just responded to the suit, and it isn't pulling any punches:
“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace."
Get used to “3D” TVs – They’re Here To Stay
We've seen a lot of TVs announced before and during IFA this year. That makes sense — it's a consumer electronics show, after all. And I guarantee that most if not all of those sets will have their 3D capability touted. It's a dangerous move, since so many consumers are wary of 3D — not enough content, bulky glasses, headaches, and so on. So there's been some grumbling: why are they including 3D on TVs when nobody wants it?
It's really pretty simple: adding 3D capability to a TV is trivial. It's a freebie feature they get to charge for.
Mozilla Labs Vaguely Announces Web-Based Gaming Initiative
Earlier today Mozilla Labs — the R&D arm of the company behind Firefox — announced that it was launching a new Gaming section focused on fostering games built on modern Open Web technologies. And to kick things off, it's inviting developers to take part in a contest to develop the best games for the Open Web. At least, it's inviting them to look forward to a competition that will begin later this month (the logistics haven't been announced).
The contest itself isn't out of the norm — Mozilla Labs runs challenges every two months for its various projects. But the long-term vision for this new Games project is extremely vague at this point. The main site for the Gaming section states that Mozilla is looking to "help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices", but it doesn't really get into how it will do that. 
Leaked Video Of IE9 In Action Shows Minimalist UI
The video above just hit YouTube showing Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 9 in action. Unlike previous previews, this one shows what appears to be the full UI and chrome around the browser. There is not much to look at because the UI is extremely minimal, getting out of the way of the Websites it is supposed to showcase.
There isn't even much of a toolbar up top. There are forward and back buttons, an address bar, and three buttons to the right, which appear to be a home button, a favorites icon, and an arrow which presumably opens up other menu options. The frame is semi-transparent, and the soundless video depicts some IE9 demos which have been seen before which show off the speed of the hardware-accelerated browser. 
Sign Up Now For The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon
The fall edition of TechCrunch Disrupt is fast approaching - less than three weeks to go before the conference kicks off on September 27th. As part of the New York event we held an overnight hackathon immediately beforehand, organized by hackers extraordinaire Daniel Raffel, Chad Dickerson, and Tarikh Korula, and it was, without a doubt, a smashing success. Over 300 participants built some really incredible projects: one team built a sword-wielding robot (Mr. Stabby as he was affectionately known); another team modified eye tracking software to let you play Mario Brothers with your eyes. One team kept building their idea after the Hackathon ended and has secured a nice chunk of money to turn it into a company.
Naturally, we'll be doing this again at Disrupt San Francisco. We've got some great judges lined up, including Joshua Schachter, moot, and Dean Hovey. Tons of you have been emailing us asking when you could sign up for a slot - and we have good news. Signups are now open! Head on over now, and check out all the details below. 
Google’s Kinetic Logo Apparently Has To Do With Their Big Search Event Tomorrow
By now, you've likely noticed the interesting, kinetic logo Google has had up today. While there is still no official word from the search giant as to exactly what it means, they are letting out some hints. And based on those hints, a good guess seems to be that the logo has to do with what they'll announce at their big search event being held in San Francisco's MOMA tomorrow morning.
Earlier today, Google tweeted out: "Boisterous doodle today. Maybe it's excited about the week ahead..." Meanwhile, a Google representative told Search Engine Roundtable that "today's doodle is not related to a birthday but is fast, fun and interactive, just the way we think search should be." This led the blog to speculate that three things may be announced tomorrow: AJAX-powered search results, 30 results per page, and streaming results as you type. In the case of AJAX and streaming, Google has been testing both of these (in the AJAX case, since early 2009).
Eric Schmidt: “We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like”
During a keynote at the IFA in Berlin, Eric Schmidt topped off presentations on Voice Powered Search, Street View Search and Google TV by emphasizing how much Google values being fast and that current technological advancements are nearing the realm of science fiction, or what he called, "The age of augmented humanity."
The IFA stands for International Funkausstellung, which roughly translates to International Radio Exhibition. In a press release, IFA Director Jens Heithecker explained the interesting choice of keynote speaker.
Michelle Obama Program Blames Sony PlayStation For Making America’s Children Fat
Consuming more calories than you use makes you fat. That's a fact, Jack. Figuring out where these calories come from, OK, that's a noble endeavor, but let's not pretend there's anything secret going on here. Like, you see this graphic here? It's the winner of some Michelle Obama-headed design contest to help folks figure out how to best fight childhood obesity. And you'll see the PlayStation completely demonized, as if Sony itself is somehow responsible for little kids packing on the pounds.
HP Confirms It Is Suing Mark Hurd For Potential Leakage Of Trade Secrets To Oracle
It seems like only yesterday that Oracle announced it was hiring former HP CEO Mark Hurd to be a Co-President and member of the Board -- that's because it was just yesterday. And now just one day later, we have a lawsuit filed by HP to block such a maneuver by Oracle.
In confirming the lawsuit in a brief blog post today, HP's official corporate blog highlights what they see as the key issue here: trade secrets and confidential information. HP even included a link to the full complaint that they've posted on Scribd (embed below). Here's the key nugget:
We Make Our Turkish Celebrity Gossip TV Show Debut Thanks To The Facebook Song
At TechCrunch, we're obviously no strangers to having our reports cited in the mainstream media from time to time. But one latest example is particularly awesome. A couple weeks ago, we mentioned the excellent Facebook music video by Turkish pop star Ismail YK. Apparently, that story led to an entire segment on a Turkish celebrity gossip show, as Turkish TechCrunch reader Arda Kutsal (and editor of Turkish Web 2.0 site Webrazzi) pointed out.
Kutsal was even able to find the clip of the segment on YouTube. If you cut to about 1:40 in you'll see and hear a massive amount about TechCrunch and myself. Though, if you're like me and can't understand Turkish, you'll probably understand little else. Still, very cool.
As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door
Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it's been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we've confirmed with sources close to Digg.
In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can't simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced—it is supposed to be faster and scale better—but perhaps it is still too experimental. Or maybe it's just the way Digg implemented it (Twitter uses Cassandra, although not for its main data store, as does Facebook in places, but it obviously is not as battle-tested as it needs to be). Every engineer at Digg is currently just trying to keep the site up and running. 
This Friday: Fred Wilson Answers Your Questions
So far most of our shows on TechCrunchTV have been about bringing you news, analysis and interviews of some of Silicon Valley's most powerful and interesting personalities. But starting this Friday, we're going to get you, dear readers, into the mix-- or at least your questions.
We're launching a new weekly show called "Ask a VC" until we think of something more clever or punny. (Paging, Dr. Carr to the newsroom...) Here's how it'll work: You email any question you want to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. We cull through those questions and pick the most unique or most frequently asked or most interesting ones and Friday morning, we get a well-known VC on Skype and we ask away. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is going first this Friday. Wilson has some of the hottest companies in his portfolio including Twitter, Zynga and Etsy. Email any questions you have for him now! We'll try to get through as many as we can.
The idea is that millions of entrepreneurs who read TechCrunch around the world don't always have access to pick these guys' brains, and we want to give you that chance. Ask questions about advice, the market, his portfolio, his blog-- anything you want. And watch Friday afternoon to see if we picked your question.
Gift card marketplace Cardpool Introduces Instant Redemption, Attracts Super Angels
There is no shortage of gift card marketplaces on the web, with startups like Cardpool, Gift Card Rescue, and Plastic Jungle all promising to rescue your unused credits or sell discounted cards. However, these sites typically require buyers to wait several days for the physical arrival of their gift cards, frustrating users who want to use credits immediately for online purchases.
Cardpool, a Y-Combinator startup founded by Anson Tsai (formerly of Anywhere.FM) and Timothy Wong, is trying to change that. Starting this morning, Cardpool will give current members the option to purchase instant redemption gift cards. While the site will still send the physical card via snail mail, a user gets immediate access to the card's codes for online use. 
US To Get the Electric Mitsubishi i-MiEV In 2011
Will 2011 be the Year of the Electric Car? Mitsubishi just announced that they will sell an upgraded i-MiEV for less than $30,000 sans the $7,500 federal tax credit complete with improved standard features and better interior. Take that, Nissan Leaf. The tiny car - it looks like a Fiat Siecento - obviously is aimed at the Smart car set and folks who may not need to go far in their twee little car.
Google Ready To Slurp Up More Yahoo Users With OpenID Sign-Ups
Google just made it easier for people with Yahoo accounts to sign up for a Google account. With one click, you can now use your Yahoo credentials to sign up for a Google account such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, or even AdWords. The one-click sign-up is done using OpenID, which both Google and Yahoo support. It also uses the OAuth authentication method quickly becoming the standard across the Web (it is the same one Twitter uses with third party apps and sites).
The idea is that instead of signing in with your Yahoo ID, and then clicking off to your Yahoo mail to click on a verification link, a button just takes you to a sign-in page on Yahoo, which verifies your account to Google, and then sends you back. It is a much more civilized way to sign into a site using an existing ID. Google first combined OpenID and OAuth back in January, 2009 with Plaxo on a test basis.
Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN Part 2: Are Super Angels Just a Phase? (TCTV)
So let me get this straight, you call yourself an angel, but you're investing limited partners' money...doesn't that just make you a small, early-stage VC? And if you're successful, don't you just raise a bigger fund and hire more partners, looking a lot more like an early stage VC?
In day two of our David v. David/ Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN, even Dave McClure admits "Super Angel" is a flawed term. But he insists there's still a difference between what he does and what David Hornik does as a partner for August Capital. And, he insists it's a better way to make money and the future of investing in the consumer Internet.
We also tackle the thorny topic of "value add." Can an investor who doesn't have operating experience really add value to a startup, and is "worked at Google" or "worked at PayPal" equal operating experience to starting, running and exiting a successful company? In old days, angels were known for deeply mentoring their portfolio companies, but how do you mentor when you're investing in 500 startups?
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