Anil Dash:
Your April Fool’s Day Joke Continues to Suck — Having been blogging for a few years, I’ve developed a few annual traditions. This one’s a favorite: Warning you off of lame April Fool’s jokes on the web. Every year, I get called a curmudgeon, or lambasted for having no sense of humor.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
YouTube RickRolls Users — If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up. — YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1.
Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched - search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid.
The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides.
Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb - mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming).
So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product.
The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip.
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If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.
YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.
This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.
More coverage of this here.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages — When I started TechCrunch nearly three years ago it was meant to be little more than a hobby. I love startups, and writing about them was fun, not work. But since then this hobby has grown into a real business.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Venture Capitalists Fight Back Against TheFunded — TheFunded, a site where entrepreneurs can leave anonymous feedback about their experiences with venture capitalists, has created quite a stir on Sand Hill Road. Rarely do I meet with a VC without the subject of it coming up, and how unfair it is.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile demands Engadget Mobile discontinue using the color magenta — So last week Deutsche Telekom, owners of the global T-Mobile brand, sent Engadget a late birthday present: a hand-delivered letter direct from their German legal department requesting the prompt discontinuation …
When I started TechCrunch nearly three years ago it was meant to be little more than a hobby. I love startups, and writing about them was fun, not work. But since then this hobby has grown into a real business. We have a number of full and part time employees that need to get paid every two weeks, and advertisers/sponsors that we owe a certain level of professionalism towards. We’ve also acquired a number of other startups. TechCrunch is a serious thing, and needs to be treated seriously by others. We demand some respect around here.
My own personal brand has risen over the years as well to the point where I believe I can say without hubris that I am a very important person. Forbes recently named me No. 2 on their list of web celebrities, for example, and Business Week says I’m one of the 25 most influential people on the web. I’ve also appeared in numerous JibJab videos. More details, if you care to read them, are on our about page. My agent has told me numerous times that I need to be more careful with how I leverage my personal brand, and to be aware of others who are using/abusing it for commercial reasons.
So we’ve been increasingly concerned about developments at Facebook over the last few months that allow advertisers to post ads using my picture and name to endorse their products without my explicit permission. I’ve received literally dozens of emails from readers asking me if I’m associated with Blockbuster’s Movie Clique application, or the new Jackass movie (no to both).
These ads appear in both the sidebar and in my friend’s news feed. See examples below:
Our attorneys believe that the use of my image and name in third party advertising is a violation of my statutory and common law publicity rights (we’ve written explicitly about this issue before). Specifically, this leads to user confusion as to whether or not I am actually endorsing these products.
The key factor in determining whether a use is permitted or not in California (where I live) is Civil Code Section 3344, which was first enacted in 1971. California is perhaps more aggressive than any other state in protecting publicity rights because of the number of people engaged in the entertainment business. The law allows for recuperation of damages, attorney’s fees and injunctive relief, as well as unspecified punitive damages and statutory damages of $750/incident in the event a person’s “name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness” is used “in any manner on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person’s prior consent.” There are additional common law remedies available to us as well.
Facebook will argue that users give permission in the terms and conditions. They also allow users to opt out of having their images placed in ads. Our lawyers say that’s a pretty good defense but that they can most likely win over a jury anyway if they focus more on emotional issues rather than the actual facts and legal precedent.
In truth, there hasn’t been much in way of actual damages to back up the lawsuit. But where we’ll really be able to stick it to Facebook is the $750 per incident statutory damages. It’s a stretch, but we’re going to argue that every impression of an ad that includes my name or likeness is an “incident.” Based on our calculations and recent comscore data, we estimate the number of impressions to be in the hundreds of thousands at the very least. Multiplying that number by $750 gets us to damages of at least $150 million.
At this point we’re prepared to settle the case for $25 million in Facebook stock (priced at the employee option price, not that ridiculous $15 billion Microsoft valuation), a small fraction of the amount we’ll almost certainly receive if this case goes to trial, plus guaranteed exclusives on all new Facebook product releases. A recent case involving Taster’s Choice, for example, had an award of $15.6 million in damages.
I am sad that this had to blow up to the point where we are publicly suing Facebook over the matter. We’ll be filing the lawsuit tomorrow along with a related civil case for assault and battery and infliction of emotional distress. In a round of negotiations over the lawsuit with Facebook led by Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, things got out of hand. When our team of lawyers offered to settle for a mere $50 million, Kelly told me Facebook would “bury you and bury your crappy blog” if we filed the suit. He then threw his steaming hot triple soy latte espresso at me, which caused extensive second degree burns over the top half of my body. Later on, he also unfriended me.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Here’s A ScreenShot Of Publish2 — Publish2, the stealth Digg-Clone-For-Journalists that announced a fundraising this morning, is being very quiet about exactly what their product is and how it works. In an interview last week they told me only friends and family were testing it.
Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:
Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.
We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!
To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.
The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.
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