Congratulations to the Financial Times. It’s taken them 10 days and three reporters to confirm our previous story that Microsoft and News Corp, along with plenty of other newspaper publishers, are in actual, formal discussions to encourage them to de-index from Google and will incentivise them with premium positions on the Bing search engine, revenue share and, in all likelihood, cold hard cash.
The interesting thing about this story is that it is typical old media. It says talks are at “an early stage” but doesn’t even mention the fact that we had cast iron information that the actual meeting took place on November 10.
Also: The FT also doesn’t link to our story – plus ca change. Why? because it’s an “article” not a blog post. As is usual with traditional media, articles very rarely link, while their blog posts (increasingly, but it’s a taken a while) do.
Apparently “the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers”. Yes, we know. We listed them in our story: Associated Newspapers, Germany’s Axel Springer and publishers from Poland and Italy, among others. We even know the name of the man at Microsoft heading up the discussion: Microsoft’s Peter Bale, Executive Producer of MSN UK.
The FT has no other new information that hasn’t been previously reported.
I’m sure I’ll get accused of trying to score points, but that’s not my aim. And I have the utmost respect for my colleagues on the FT. But there is a serious point here.
Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.
The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it’s place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.
I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my ‘key learnings’ from the event.
1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot.
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[Sweden] The much – perhaps justifiably – hyped music streaming service Spotify has extended its mobile reach significantly today with the release of an app for phones powered by the Nokia-led Symbian operating system.
This follows earlier clients for both iPhone and Android and means that the service will now be accessible on millions more handsets from Nokia, obviously, along with Sony Ericsson and Samsung which also support the platform.
[UK] London-based Fingertips.net lets users create their own personalised online newspaper “from the publications they want”. Or at least that’s the claim.
The reality is that the RSS-driven service isn’t nearly as customisable as its many competitors, such as start page Netvibes or more similar aggregators like Meehive. Instead, Fingertips only enables users to pick from around 300 sources (50,000 articles) from publications such as The Times or Heat magazine, divided into traditional sections based on subject – news, sport, travel etc.
This is our third guest post written by a London-based VC. To allow them to speak plainly without jeopardising their fund or their career in the small village that is the London VC scene, I’m allowing them to post anonymously. FYI, LondonVC is a genuine VC and TechCrunch Europe has met them face to face.
One of the biggest challenges for any investor (regardless of the stage/type of investment they target) and founders alike is hiring great talent. In early stage investing the team may be the single criteria upon which an investment decision is based (considering how many times when that’s all there is to go by) and even in later/growth stages, while the founding team has been historically crucial, bringing someone new in to help “get the company to the next level” can be the difference between investing or not.
[Holland] This week we’ve got Rutger van Waveren, Founder of Spectives.com, doing an elevator pitch. Spectives.com allows people to use images to keep track of the latest news from their favorite sites. Think of Spectives as a visual RSS, Alltop, or as a kind of Netvibes for visual news.
Unlike RSS where you have to scan text headlines for information, you can scan images. Great for a lot of visual news like cars, fashion, design, photography, sports, funny pictures and gossip.
Thanks to Techfluff.tv’s Amsterdam correspondent Isabelle O’Kane for filming this.
[UK] This week Stephen Fry – British actor, journalist, celebrity ‘Tweeter’ and self-confessed technophile – appeared alongside Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter and Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn. They discussed the future impact of social media.
The discussion was not very ‘tech’ or ’startup’ oriented, but it did touch very much on the cultural and social impact of social networks, and Twitter in particular. Stephen Fry in particular mounted a robust defence of social networks as culturally positive, not negative.
I asked a question toward the end about what Twitter does when Skype and, perhaps Facebook, enable status updates to be as public and open as Twitter, but Biz Stone simply said they ‘don’t look in the rear view mirror’. Which was not exactly a fullsome answer, but hey.
The event formed part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK programme. The video comes from NESTA.
[Belgium] Earlier this week, 3D gesture recognition software developer Softkinetic and VUB university spin-off company Optrima, inventor of patented 3D sensing technology announced a joint venture offering what they say is the most complete 3D depth-sensing imaging and gesture recognition interface solution on the market. It’s available now, and is being offered to OEMs as an all-in-one product, capable of being embedded into a wide variety of consumer digital and electronic devices. One of the first to take up the technology is semiconductor giant, Texas Instruments.
As part of the deal, terms of which are undisclosed, Softkinetic-Optrima (the JV known as SKO to avoid confusion) will port its 3D gesture recognition middleware called iisu directly onto TI’s intelligent digital signal processors. It’ll also provide direct support for OptriCam, SKO’s 3D imagers product, to TI-based development boards.
So app developers get the tools and APIs they need to develop advanced gesture-based applications without having to muck about with the technicalities of the 3D depth sensing cameras.
Essentially, it’s an SDK offering a rich set of interfaces and predefined gesture-based patterns, letting TI’s customers focus their effort on the game play itself — or whatever 3D gesture-controlled app they’re building.
I recently spoke to Softkinetic’s CEO Michel Tombroff about the upcoming deal, and though he couldn’t at the time name the as-yet-unannounced partner, he was obviously brimming with enthusiasm for SKO’s goal of getting affordable gesture recognition apps into homes across Europe and the US by the end of 2010.
Which just happens to be when Microsoft’s much-anticipated Project Natal is due. Read More
A fairly pointless but fun survey asks: If the British could follow any figure from history on Twitter, who would it be? The top answer, apparently, is ex-war time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, a man who was renown for making speeches that far exceeded 140 characters.
Jesus, who isn’t short of followers outside of the Twittersphere, came in at a surprising second.
The poll, which surveyed 2000+ people across the UK, was carried out by YouGov on behalf of Prospect Magazine. It tested the views of the 11% of British people who are estimated to use Twitter, about 5.5m, and compared them to the rest of the country. The conclusion?
Here are some random upcoming events
• CloudStorm event in Paris, December 1
CloudStorm provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors. It is free for attendees to go to and it is paid for content – i.e. each sponsor/vendor pays for their 5 min presentation slot. These are not really startups paying to pitch, but it is actual larger CloudComputing vendors paying to promote themselves to an audience of probably startups and others. So from that point of view it could be useful. The presentations are followed by a panel discussion with visitors invited to a mini expo and networking party.
