TechCrunch reports on news that despite previous trade problems between Apple and China Mobile, the iPhone may be going to China. The potential market is huge with most of the 200 million internet users in China getting access from their cell phone. The news comes from an insider rumor published by it.hexun.com and translated by Marbridge Consulting.

A source inside the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) revealed yesterday that China Mobile (NYSE: CHL; 0941.HK) had reached a basic agreement with Apple to cooperate on bringing the iPhone to China without the revenue-sharing agreements Apple has in place with other carriers. Instead, China Mobile will procure the handsets for their full price, and then on-sell subsidized handsets to consumers. The source explained that China Mobile could buy a 3G iPhone from Apple for USD 299 – an example price – and then sell the handset to users for USD 199, treating the additional USD 100 as compensation to Apple.

Look at this recent quote from Techcrunch's Mike Arrington "Creating a separate social network makes little sense in the age of MySpace and Facebook".

He's highlighted a key change in thinking on how to build your social network platform over the past year. The big social networks have effectively commoditised vast swathes of previously competitive functionality:

• authentication
• web user interface standards
• friend lists
• groups
• events
• email
• notifications
• photo sharing
• discussions

If you're building a new social network on your own web site you'll need to build all of the above. Not only that you'll need to make sure the experience is as good as, if not better than these million dollar competitors. If you've got a complex sign up process - forget it - 80 million Facebook users really can't be wrong.

There are very few decent reasons for implementing your own social network. These are as follows:

• you're dealing with commercially sensitive information that you don't want Facebook or Myspace to see (think about intranets for banks)
• your demographic aren't on one of the big networks and probably never will be (this might legitimise the Saga zone business proposition but I doubt it - the crinklies are coming to Facebook I have no doubt, it's just a matter of time)
• your content would be illegal on the platform (you can't gamble on Facebook so gambling communities need their own poker network etc)

Any other reasons people can think of?

Very interesting post by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch today about predicting the Presidential election based upon a candidates Web site traffic. Hitwise, an Experian company which provides internet traffic analysis, has published recent data on the traffic that both the Obama and McCain campaigns have seen in the last month. While the results may not shed much light on the upcoming election’s outcome, they have revealed a few interesting trends.

From TechCrunch:

Hitwise has ranked each state by two criteria: its contribution to each site’s total traffic, and the the overall likelihood that a user in the state will visit the candidate’s site (called the Representation index). If either metric is applicable to the election, it will be Representation Index, which indicates the candidate’s popularity on a per-state basis and isn’t affected by the state’s population.

Unsurprisingly, California represents the most traffic share for both candidates, accounting for 13% of Obama’s total traffic and 12% of McCain’s. But both candidates have also seen a similar Representation Index from the state, which means that a similar number of Californians have visited each site. Given the state’s Democratic history, this is surprising - apparently Californians are interested in learning about the opposition. Conversely, in left-leaning New York, McCain’s site has only seen about half as much traffic as Obama’s.

Hitwise also notes that the highest Representation Index for Obama came from Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC, while McCain’s come from Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, and Louisiana. More of McCain’s states are “battlegrounds”, but there’s no way of knowing if people are visiting these sites because they like him or hate him - perhaps the traffic stats from McCainSpace would be a better indicator.

Interesting article on TechCrunch about a new startup called Inigral:

"Back when Facebook was a social network only for college students, one of the most popular features was the ability to see not only who was in your class, but who else was taking the same courses as you. (It must have been great for coming up with insightful pick-up lines). Facebook did away with that feature as it broadened beyond the college market. But now another startup is looking to fill the void that Facebook left behind. It is called Inigral and it is backed by the Founders Fund , the same group of angel investors who first invested in Facebook (Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund is still on Facebook's board)."

Read full article here

The TechCrunch audience is pretty technically savvy.  I can imagine a majority of their readers use RSS.

I wonder how many noticed the redesign before they said something.

TechCrunch has redesigned their index pages in an obvious bid to deliver more pageviews to advertisers. Just 6 months ago, it would have been inconceivable that the flagship of Michael Arrington's Crunch empire would need such a shot in the arm, but the traffic measurement services don't lie:

The site actually looks pretty good with the new redesign, but that's not the point of this post. What's to blame for the sagging performance? Increased competition from traditional players such as Cnet, AOL, and the NYTimes? Increased migration from the web to RSS readers? Lack of bubbly exits and exciting news coming from the startups covered by TC? Probably a combination of all three. Luckily, it seems that the conference business is booming, as TechCrunch50 threatens to sell out of $3,000 tickets.

The New CNET

The New Techcrunch

If you were to take away text, would you know that this is a site about the business of technology. Seriously. Ask yourself that question. Design is not subjective my friends, design should be honest and true to the task @ hand.

Before I start - I apologize - I had to choose yet another Wordpress Theme because the previous one didn't allow me to post side Widgets!

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October 15, 2008 -  Memorize This Date.  It's the second edition of this exclusive but open online event. I am totally impressed with the opening video on the site. Genius! This years Blog Action Day takes on the issue of poverty.

I am also impressed that so far over 3,000 blogs/websites are participating which represents an audience of about 4.1 million (so far).  The site also provides a lot of information about how to get involved in the event.  Publish - Donate - Promote

Events such as this are an important example of what the web can do in terms of social awareness and in this case, hopefully - social change.  Bringing awareness to the issue of poverty in this scale further proves that the web community has power and can make a difference.

Participating sites and blogs include: TechCrunch, LifeHacker, Mashable, SalesForce, VentureBeat and Gigaom.  Go to the site to see those who signed up.

So however you choose to participate - do just that - Participate!

Bravo BlogActionDay - Count Me In!

Eric Shonfeld from TechCrunch gets us moving on a digital rights conversation with his annotated list below. See my notes (here, and here) on the recent Privacy Symposium as a contrasting backdrop.

The Right to Use and Reuse Content: Consumers know that digital copies of songs, words, and videos are qualitatively different than physical copies, yet copyright law treats them the same way. When the economics of scarcity no longer apply, consumers start to behave differently. They copy and reuse content in unforeseen ways. The pendulum has swung so far that normal consumer behavior has now been criminalized. The concept of fair use needs to be updated and clarified, while still balancing the fundamental right of copyright holders to profit from their creations.

The Right To Control Digital Property On Your Own Device: Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but digital devices don’t follow that rule. When it comes to digital property, who owns what is ill-defined. This can become especially complicated when content is tied to a specific device. If I download a digital book to my Kindle or an app to my iPhone, Amazon or Apple (to pick on them again) have the ability to pull any content from my device without notice or permission. Even if I’ve paid for the content in question. Copyright law and DRM technologies are so intertwined and confused that both consumers and companies could benefit from clearer rules of the road.

The Right To The Free Flow Of Information: Internet service providers, especially those who benefit from public rights of way, should not be allowed to discriminate against information by data type. Debates about Net Neutrality can get bogged down in discussions about content filtering, packet prioritization, and backbone peering rules. But the issue here is basic access to the Internet and all the data that it contains. Data is information and artificial limits on what kinds of data can flow through the Internet’s pipes can amount to a form of censorship.

The Right To (Some) Privacy: For the most part, the expectation of privacy is dead on the Web. But the privacy of certain types of information (health, financial) will always need to be protected. Federal guidelines for how to protect consumer data is preferable to a hodgepodge of industry and state regulations that are currently failing us. (Who wants to book a room at the Best Western?) Privacy laws are also inconsistent in the physical and digital worlds. The Bork law, for instance, makes it illegal for physical video stores to share my rental records, but iTunes or Amazon could sell my digital video or music purchases without running afoul of the law.

The Right to Control Your Digital Identity: And what happens when the “content” in question is your own digital identity. Who owns that? The answer should be that you do. Congress is certainly interested in this issue, and wants to make sure that online advertising networks don’t abuse their possession of your identity data to bombard you with ads. In fact, Google and Yahoo, have been making preemptive moves in an attempt to stave off regulation. But politicians may want to take a closer look at the EU’s privacy directive, which has been in effect for more than decade. Citizens should be able certify that the digital identity associated with their name in a given database is in fact theirs and to revoke access to that identity information on a case-by-case basis.

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• What We Need Is A Digital Bill Of Rights

From TechCrunch:

Today, Technorati is announcing the acquisition of Blogcritics, a six year old blog network that we first wrote about in 2005. The price, which was all cash, is not being disclosed but our guess is that it is in the $1 million range.

Blogcritics is similar to Salon’s newly launched Open Salon, which lets lots of people write articles from time to time on topics they’re familiar with. The site has had published submissions from 2,300 authors, many of which maintain their own blogs as well. 73,000 articles have been published in the six years since launching. The site draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors who generate 3-4 million page views.

Authors maintain the copyright on their content and grant a perpetual license to Blogcritics.

This could be just the beginning as Technorati believes that they will likely acquire more content sites in the near future.

It has been confirmed that Amazon has acquired Shelfari , a social network for bibliophiles, for an undisclosed fee. Amazon has previously invested $1 million in the site.

TechCrunch is reporting that “the move comes less than a month after Amazon’s acquisition of AbeBooks , a vendor of rare and used books from independent publishers. As part of that acquisition Amazon also got a stake in Shelfari’s competitor LibraryThing , which AbeBooks had previously purchased a 40% stake in”.

At first glance it would make sense for Amazon to merge Shelfari and LibraryThing, there is some bad feeling between the two companies.  LibraryThing’s founder has previously and openly criticized Shelfari for spamming users and so called astroturfing blogs. Our guess is that Amazon will only support one of them; what will happen to the other is open but given the investment into LibraryThing it would make no sense letting the company die.

You can see Shelfari’s blog post on the acquisition here .

“Certainly we made mistakes, and unfortunately we were impacted by factors beyond our control including the current economic environment and state of the travel industry. We came close to realizing a different outcome for our venture but, as the saying goes, close doesn’t count. At the end of the day, despite a well-received, market-leading product and early success with strategic partners such as Orbitz and Alaska Airlines, we simply ran out of money to continue executing on our vision.”

(quote from TechCrunch).

From TechCrunch:

Tweetrush isn’t able to track direct messages or messages from private users, but the numbers are still much lower than anticipated. Either something is wrong with the data, or Twitter usage is far lower than we expected.

The data is coming via Gnip, which was given access to Twitter’s XMPP firehose last month. Tweetrush founder AJ McKee says they believe the data is being under-reported based on scraping checks they’ve done on Twitter, but that for now Twitter isn’t helping them or Gnip correct data usage. Now that they’ve launched, perhaps Twitter will correct any issues.

The site is a demonstration of the technology behind a in-development analytics product for developers called Rush Hour, which will be launched later next year.

From the article:

Most of Facebook’s growth is international, where they’ve executed on a brilliant strategy for quickly rolling out localized versions of sites by getting their users to do the translation work for them (MySpace, by contrast, expands via a command-and-control infrastructure that puts people on the ground in each new international market). But the commercial value of some of those international users is far less than the U.S., the UK, Japan and a handful of other countries with robust online advertising markets.

Music is MySpace’s territory. They host millions of artist and band pages, and one of the first things any new band does is create their MySpace page. MySpace says 35 million people per month visit their music sites, including MySpace Music and various artist pages. Some artists have millions of “friends” and the pages allow streaming music, artist control over the look and feel of the site, etc.

Facebook, by contrast, has no real internal music strategy. Artists can set up Pages to promote themselves, but the pages are no different to any other fan pages (for example, no streaming music) - there is nothing music or artist specific on the site.

Next month MySpace is rolling out a new music joint venture with the major labels that will have music streaming, playlists, downloads, merchandise sales, ring tones and other features. It’s not only likely to be a major destination site for music but also a significant revenue driver for MySpace and the labels (a little may trickle down to the artists as well).

Music is a huge part of what drove historical MySpace growth, and I believe it is a major factor in perpetuating their lead over Facebook in the U.S. market.

Facebook doesn’t appear to be engaging in any direct music strategy at all. Instead, they’ve placed their bet on iLike, a third party application that has no streaming deal (they piggyback on Rhapsody). Last month Facebook announced that they’ll give iLike special access to Facebook through their new Great Apps program. All official and most off record messaging we’re hearing is that iLike is Facebook’s music partner for the long run.

At its core Facebook is still a generic social network that, through the social graph, provides an easy way to connect with friends. MySpace by contrast has the social graph as well as a huge footprint in the music world. That not only provides a reason to go to the site, but provides a nice business model as well.

I can say that I've personally used MySpace to learn more about bands and music a lot over the past few years. I have hardly used Facebook's iLike for this. I'm also well known by friends, colleagues and family to like MySpace more than Facebook and I feel that it is the better social networking Web site, in my opinion. So I may have a biased opinion towards MySpace.

Maybe this is because I have been a user of MySpace for a longer period of time but I have always enjoyed my MySpace experiences, whereas I get bored with Facebook quite easily. To each his own, right? Does anyone else get bored with MySpace or Facebook?

Thoughts?

Stone details the latest installment of "Great Trade Show Battles." Michael Arrington, founder of the popular Internet blog TechCrunch, is taking on DEMO, one of the bigger pay-to-play trade shows around. TechCrunch’s model is currently designed to put start ups in front of audiences comprised of venture capitalists, investors, and prospective clients. Sounds like all the others, right? Well, the difference is how they do it. They screen their applicants, allowing only the top 50 through to the conference, letting them present their wares for free – the kind of price most start ups prefer. Those 50 companies must be pretty special, too (at least to the selection committee). The pool of applicants is over 1,000. Sure, TechCrunch’s show makes money on sponsorships and all of that standard stuff, but their willingness and commitment to cutting some of the noise and linking together both those providing solutions and those seeking them is refreshing.

Of course, the tangential benefit of being selected is just as important as the low price of inclusion. It is an accomplishment, in and of itself, to be selected to present. Start ups will wear that selection like a badge of honor and get a bunch of PR and marketing buzz out of it.

What this battle introduces to a wide swath of audiences is the groundswell of support for effective ways trade shows can facilitate the selection and education of solution providers and seekers. Some trade shows become very enamored with themselves, and forget that their real mission should be a strong commitment to their attendees’ researching and finding an effective solution for their business.

What makes this relevant to Knotice’s blog is that we attend a few trade shows and are always seeking ways to stand out in a crowd. Usually, shows do anything to make money, so there are no limits on who exhibits and how. That puts pressure on the exhibitors (which we actually like) to do something outlandish and interesting. Since we’re not going to TechCrunch, and we are going to Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas next month, we’ve planned something we hope is interesting. If you plan on attending, check out our booth (#222) – you can’t miss it.

Oh, and the web version of the newspaper article I read can be found here. It’s guaranteed not to get ink on your hands.