TechCrunch Archive

Yesterday Kontera announced a new $15.5 million dollar round of funding. Kontera provides in-text ads which are the ads that typically are double underlined on a page. When you mouse over one of the in-text ads, a “window” opens with a bit of info and images about the ad and a user can click on the ad if they are interested. Publishers are only paid if the user actually clicks on the window and visits the advertiser’s website.

I’ve run in-text ads from Kontera competitor Intellitxt for about a year on our sister site HTMLCenter. The results were strong in the beginning but have since slowed to a point where I will most likely remove the ads at some point in the near future. Earlier this week I noticed that Bing appears to be running a massive campaign with Intellitxt.

When the Kontera funding news hit the wire, Techcrunch writer Robin Wauters posted about the news and called the in-text ads “annoying”. He noted, “I find this type of contextual advertising annoying from a reader perspective…”

Last night a friend of mine messaged me after a “conversation” with Robin on Twitter about his Kontera post and comments. Here’s the conversation (my emphasis):

• Till – Do you realize the double standard when you call Kontera annoying while TechCrunch runs snap.com?
• Robin – why? you can turn Snap off as a reader.
• Till – That’s beyond hilarious. Next time, for full disclosure, I suggest you add, “TechCrunch runs the also annoying snap.com”.
• Robin – did you fail to grasp what I just wrote? you can turn snap off. clue. find it.
• Till – You can disable Kontera with an ad blocker. Snap isn’t less annoying. Just like spam, “please unsubscribe here”.
• Robin – you’re either retarded or trying hard to pose as one. disabling snap is a snap setting.
• Till – You don’t see my point. You call out a service, while you run something very, very similar. That’s a double standard.
• Robin – why do I get into insane arguments with hopeless idiots so late at night? night all!
• Till – Aside from personal attacks (Congrats!) – if you had your homework, you would know that you can turn off Kontera as well.

It’s very disappointing to see a writer for the so-called tech blog leader calling people names when asked about their posts. Insults aside, Till has an excellent point – one that Robin appears to have missed. I am unsure if Techcrunch is paid by Snap but the magic 8ball says “all signs point to yes”. Earlier this year I had several chats with the Snap team about adding the paid publisher service to CN and they confirmed that TC was part of the same program.

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This morning we noted that DEMO was now offering some amount of money in advertising to the two winners at their startup-infomercial. As I noted in an update on that article, I am no longer sure if the total amount is $1 or $2 million.

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes – anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 – Demo: 1 – Startup: 0“.

Last month I discussed presenting at the DEMO and TC50 conferences later this year. In the comments, Techcrunch50 founder Jason Calacanis noted that one of the big differences between the two startup-infomercial conferences is that his Techcrunch50 offers $50,000 to the winner.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

The title of this column is a question I am asked a couple of times a week…”should I present/apply to the DEMO or TC50 conference?” Both conferences require applications to be turned in by June 30th so I thought this was a great time to share my thoughts and feedback I’ve received about the conferences.

Let’s get the logistics out of the way – DEMO will be held on September 21-23, 2009 and Techcrunch50 will be held on September 14-15, 2009. Depending on the date of registration, attendees pay $2,000-3,000 for DEMO and $1,500-3,000 for Techcrunch50. (as a side note, I’ve seen tc50 producer Jason Calacanis giving away bunches of free tickets on his podcast, so you might try that road to avoid the high costs).

Last year I was one of the few people who attended both pitch events. You can read all of my coverage and an in-person comparison between both events. Overall DEMO was a better run show logistics-wise.

My thoughts are based on web/Internet businesses. If you have a physical product or other IT-related service, DEMO is basically the only choice.
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Over the past couple of weeks the chatter about search functionality with regards to Twitter has come up again so I thought it might make sense to take a look back at how search has evolved with this exploding worldwide platform.

The Early Days

While most of Twitter’s users today weren’t around in the early days, many of you were. These were the days of the whale of fail, the rat in your pc and the general fun. Back then, there was no search function. If you wanted to know what your friend had for lunch or if your friend’s cat made a #2 on your friend’s carpet, you had to go to the account for your friend or his/her cat and just page back and forth. It was a tough time.

Summize

Then, like cream cheese on a fresh bagel, here comes NY-based Summize. Now we are talking! (well searching). Summize allowed us to search in near real-time for our friend’s messages. Want to know if that really was an earthquake? Pop “earthquake” into Summize. It was a real pleasure. Soon after the search engine was acquired by Twitter and renamed to Twitter Search and it still lives today. Twit messages are ranked by last posted in the results and there is no weighting to the results. The search functionality is also available within the Twitter site itself on the right side of a profile page.

Authority Search

Late last year during the “made up fights” between several valley bloggers and entrepreneurs, a discussion arose about creating an awesome Twitter search engine that would rank search results based on who has more followers. This was awesome…users who have lots of followers would appear higher in search. Bloody brilliant concept! Surely there would be no way to game the system to get more followers, right? Well, six months later and the rank by followers chatter has died out.

Note: somewhere in here Twitter introduced the Default List – this is the list that pumps certain celebs, FOT, fluffers, people who deliver cupcakes to twitter hq, etc.
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I don’t know about you but when I read all the Twitter coverage on some of the major tech blogs like Techcrunch, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Some of my friends say it can just be too much for one person to take. You might be questioning “why” or “how”. From what I’ve heard, some turn to drinking, some have begun to smoke, even the ones I thought were strong are starting to feel the effects.

There’s good news as NY-based doctor appointment service ZocDoc has announced that their service now works with psychiatrists. Perhaps a few visits to a shrink will help return those we have lost back to full sanity. Couple of those happy pills will help just about anyone! The ZocDoc service is free to use as they get paid by the listed doctors after an appointment has been scheduled.

ZocDoc lets you review your doctors after the appointments have concluded – it will be interesting to read the reviews of the listed psychiatrists.

Check out my real world review of ZocDoc when I attempted to go to the dentist.