Unfortune

Cablevision Systems Corp. is close to buying the Long Island newspaper Newsday from Tribune Co. for $650 million, a person with knowledge of the situation said Sunday.

The Apple online store has stopped selling iPhones completely, stating they are currently unavailable. What does it mean? In some way I’m inclined to say “not much.” Apple rarely telegraphs its moves this far in advance. However, since O2 in the UK has stopped selling iPhones and a number of folks have had trouble buying them in stores, we might be seeing a next-gen iPhone in the next few days. Here’s hoping.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Most of my time these days is spent crossing the blood-brain barrier between Twitter and the rest of the cloud. Twitter stands on one side, a coursing stream of social data emanating from an ad-hoc framework of asynchronous follows and vanity track filtering. On the other side, the legacy blogosphere, RSS items floated via Google Reader shared items and planted in the Twitter stream via TinyURLs.

Managing the transfer of data across the barrier are two applications. One (FriendFeed) is disguised as a social media aggregator, and the other (Twhirl) is disguised as a rich internet application extension of Twitter that allows multiple users, point-and-click UI enhancements of the vanilla Twitter feed, and, common to all third-party apps, a licensing limitation on polling the Twitter API.

On Tuesday, Twitter suffered its first substantial test since the 3-or-so day outage several weeks ago, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries where Barack Obama essentially sealed the nomination of the Democratic Party. As the polls closed and traffic spiked, the Twitter real time gateway through IM and SMS collapsed, leaving those of us who live on that transport high and dry. within minutes, we switched over to Twhirl, which slowly but more quickly came back online than the gateway through, in my case, Gmail’s Gchat.

For the next several hours, I ping-ponged back and forth between the two services, Gchat arrayed on the left of the screen in a vertical browser window, and Twhirl in its AIR container hovering above the right of the screen and notifications rolling up from the bottom of my MacBook AIR as they were received from API requests. The Gchat gateway went up and down, alternating between no service and old tweets paging in as the database of outstanding tweets was flushed, until sometime after 7PM Pacific they synchronized just about the time Obama gave his victory speech.

The outage illustrated one more time (as if it were not obvious already) the need for a scalable and reliable Twitter, or at least one third party service that also provides the gateway functionality: Real time conversations between discoverable endpoints not necessarily aware of each other until the swarming characteristics of an event, an idea, a personality, an affinity group, or any combination of these elements are enabled. Twhirl’s Loic Le Meur announced such features on the May 2nd edition of The Gillmor Gang.

Friendfeed will likely follow suit, but it raises more questions than it answers with its expanded comment infrastructure and extended harvesting of non-Twitter streams such as delicious and blogs. Robert Scoble has used Friendfeed and its Hide function as a refuge from too much noise on Twitter answering his 20k followers, but only when Twitter implements track filtering will mass following cease to be a feature driver.

Less solvable are the tactical feints by startups that masquerade as standards-based solutions to the so-called centralization problem. Gillmor Gangs on Thursday and Friday delved into the mysteries of decentralization, but I remain unconvinced that these strategies do little more than shift the controlling authority for the Twitter namespace to other potential landlords. First, it won’t happen as long as Twitter executives maintain open XMPP access to third parties, and provide timely and responsive solutions to track spam and predictive scalability for event thresholds during the next few months.

Second, a careful reading of tech politics suggests the takeover of Twitter is an unlikely occurrence given the weakness of second tier players like Yahoo and Sun and the strengths of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo looks like Hillary’s shadow campaign as it walks through the motions of building out a social media personalization strategy while Microsoft’s Mesh infrastructure obsoletes the portal logic it’s based on. Sun is courting social media superdelegates while IBM is piling up the popular vote with customers in the midmarket. In both cases, the numbers are brutal in their inevitability. Scott McNealy should engineer a merger of the two weaklings and give Jonathan Schwartz some tools to survive, matching Yahoo users with Sun/Amazon clusters.

But even that unlikely mating would be swift meat for Microsoft, who is all over why Twitter is fundamental to the next phase of the enterprise network. No matter who owns the pipes, the real struggle is to deliver the drugs across the blood brain barrier. Mesh abstracts out the hardware layer at a deeper level than Amazon or Solaris with its virtualization layer — down at the social layer where the users live and control the domain. It’s the users, stupid, as Carville famously put it. Once switching costs are controllable, the user can band together in affinity groups and mandate the price vendors will need to pay to be listened to.

At its simplest (its true power) Twitter is a phone switch for routing information flow. Those who control the flow control the price for the information. In a virtualized platform, the hardware is the razor and the software switch is the blades. The software switch is an affinity-based construct that manages the signal-to-noise ratio of the information flow based on the contouring signals (gestures) of the members of the group. In the language of Twitter, it’s who you follow times what you track divided by how you filter.

The trick is squeezing the firehose down into multiplexed channels across the blood brain barrier and then expanding them as they flood the brain and its synaptic map. The architecture of swarms has unique characteristics that we are seeing modeled in the contortions of Friendfeed, Facebook Connect, Ustream chatrooms, Google Reader Notes, Disqus, and the rest of what Marc Canter calls the open mesh. It goes beyond bootstrapping, harnessing the brain’s ability to add the gut instinct of survivability to the equation of what choices can be made about information triage.

Simply put, you have to have the ability to broadcast an acuity for successful guesses. We’re at the doorway of gesture farming, where individual gesturers go beyond implicit behavior harvesting and aggregation and overtly share not just what they like but what they ignore. We’re seeing this in the political realm, where people are tuning out repetitive and shrill networks built on track spamming (Reverend Wright, Day One, electability) and tuning in to credible authentic sources regardless of media affiliation. They’re going direct via TinyUrl and their social graph (follow/track/filter) ontology.

Those who laugh at Twitter and trivialize it are insulting the very users they want to engage with. In elections, that is a fatal mistake. In technology acquisition and adoption, it is similarly Darwinian. Ballmer’s buh-bye is still being discounted as posturing, but in a real-time conversation, once you’ve met the mettle of the (wo)man, you know what you need to know. I think Ballmer and Gates and Ozzie had already made the calculation before they made the offer, namely that they were looking for a partnership with Yahoo’s users and developers, not with its executives. That is not to say they were not valuable, just that they would have to prove their value in the conversation. They didn’t. The rest is still in play.

Decentralizing Twitter is unnecessary, if not impractical. Dave Winer was right the first time, when he intuitively grasped the power of Twitter was not in what it was designed to be but in what it could be used for. By building on top of it, Winer signaled that instinct that he marshaled into RSS, the gesture of respect, the idea that in Steve Stills’ words, “Somethings happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear…” Twitter ain’t broke, and we don’t need to fix it.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Retail gasoline prices jumped to yet another record high Sunday, according to drivers’ advocacy group AAA’s Web site.

Editor’s note: The press release is the least loved document in the media universe. We get way too many here at TechCrunch, and some bloggers equate them to spam. But they do have their uses. In this guest post, Brian Solis explains how the press release has evolved, and sheds some light on why it may be so difficult to kill off. Solis writes this from the perspective of a PR professional. He is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0.

Press releases come in different flavors and serve different purposes. Well-written press releases are far from dead. In fact, when developed strategically, their opportunities, appeal and benefits are only expanding in conjunction with the groups of various influencers and consumers who rely on them for relevant information.

The disruption of the Web has splintered press releases into a variety of formats to serve different audiences and different purposes: Traditional releases for media, SEO (search engine optimized) releases for customers, and Social Media Releases for press, bloggers, and also customers.

Customer-Focused News Releases
Companies and marketers can use distribution services to complement releases written for journalists and bloggers to reach customers directly through traditional search engines as well as news aggregation services such as Techmeme.

Over the course of the last several months, BusinessWire and PRNewswire have consistently ranked in the top 100 sources for news in Techmeme’s Leaderboard.

And, according to a recent Outsell study, over 51% of IT professionals reported that they get their news from press releases in Yahoo and Google news over trade journals.

And it’s not just tech. When implemented with calls and links to action, and if they read in a way that’s compelling to people aka customers, you’ll find that they’re usually compelled to act.

The trick for this new breed of press releases is to write it as the article you want to read. Keep it clean, clear, pseudo impartial, but definitely focused on benefits for specific customers. Basically, humanize the story.

Here’s a rundown of the different formats of press releases:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Women 2.0 held its second pitch event today on the kempt grounds of the Stanford Golf Course Grill. It was a chance for five private tech companies with at least 50% female ownership to compete for a prize suite of business services collectively worth $15,000, plus a chance to meet with Esther Dyson.

The five finalists - Koollage, Gaiagy, Skillshop, Webvet, and Passive Devices - were chosen by 20 professional investors out of a pool of over 125 submissions. They each had 10 minutes to pitch their companies to attendees and a panel of 9 judges, after which the judges picked an overall winner and the crowd voted for a People’s Choice winner.

Koollage took home the main prize with its mashup service that focuses on delivering content to mobile devices, and the iPhone in particular. Users can create widgets called “pods” that mix different types of digital media such as video, images, and search results. These pods will be marketed primarily to bloggers who want to get their content and related media onto mobile devices. A freemium pricing scheme will provide two options: a free version with a revenue split on ads, and a paid version with no imposed advertising. Tumblr is said to be the closest non-mobile competitor.

People’s Choice winner Gaiagy will give building owners (both individuals and businesses) personal recommendations for how they can most economically make their operations more “green”. The site will focus on three primary areas: space heating and cooling, water heating, and lighting, with a beta version of the lighting tool slated for launch at the end of the summer. Gaiagy will not only recommend building products that can be bought directly online, but it will also rate and refer the installers who are needed for many eco-friendly upgrades. A second version of the service with recommendation tools for 6 products will be launched by 2009.

Of the three other presenting companies, WebVet was the most promising web service. The site aims to be “WebMD for pets” - a place where people can find professionally produced and organized information about animal health issues. The company will license content from industry experts as well as employ 25 writers. While people often use WebMD for self-diagnosis, Webvet wants to avoid the fate of attracting visitors only when their pets are sick, so it will provide additional content relevant to pet ownership such as human interest stories and breaking news.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The platform wars are going mobile. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry,Android or Windows Mobile, the mobile platform that will win in the end will be the one with the best and broadest collection of applications. To give developers a little extra financial motivation, funds are being set up to invest in them. Google announced a $10 million Android challenge back in November, and Kleiner Perkins announced its $100 million iFund for iPhone-only startups in March. Now, it looks like Research in Motion is about to announce its own $150 million Blackberry Partners Fund (site not up yet) to spur applications and services for its mobile device.

At least, that is what VentureBeat reports in an item that appeared in its feed, but has since been pulled from the site (see headline here). According to that post (excerpt):

Research In Motion, the RBC and Thomson Reuters have invested in an $150 million venture investment fund, called the BlackBerry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on the Blackberry.

The announcement will be made in Orlando at a convention on Monday.

The venture firm backing the fund is Canada’s JLA Ventures, a Montreal and Toronto firm active in mobile. That firm will co-manage the investing process, together with the investment group of Canada’s largest bank, RBC Venture Partners. RIM, RBC and Thomson are anchor investors in the fund. Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion, is on the advisory board of JLA Ventures.

The fund will focus on Blackberry apps, but will also be free to to invest in startups that develop for other mobile platforms as well. That’s smart because no startup should restrict itself to just one device.

But doesn’t it seem like everyone thinks they need to dangle money in front of startups to attract them to their platform these days? (See also the fbFund for Facebook startups and and the MySpace incubator spinoff Slingshot Labs). What ever happened to simply building the best damn platform in the world and letting the app developers come to you because that’s where all the users are?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

News Corp., the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, has withdrawn its bid to purchase the Long Island daily paper Newsday, a News Corp. spokeswoman said Saturday.

A spokeswoman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. says the media conglomerate has withdrawn its bid to purchase Newsday.

San Francisco based search startup Powerset will be launching shortly. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.”

But now the company may have to make a hard decision: sell now to one of the big Internet players looking for a point of differentiation in search, or take the risk of going it alone and possibly getting a huge, multi-billion dollar payoff down the road.

According to our sources, Powerset is exploring both options. They hired Dave Wehner, a Managing Director at investment bank Allen & Co. (he’s the guy who sold Bebo for $850 million to AOL, and is working on LinkedIn’s huge financing), to represent them in a possible sale or financing.

CNET is reporting today that Microsoft may be bidding for the company. According to our sources, those discussions have been going on for well over a month, and their most recent bid is “around $100 million.”

That probably won’t be enough to convince Powerset and their investors to sell. The big question is whether Google will step in to try and keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, and start a real bidding war. That could drive the price significantly higher. Google, however, has publicly dismissed the notion of contextual search as a revolutionary step forward.

Whether that’s true or not is yet to be seen. But Powerset may find itself as a valuable chess piece in the emerging search war between Google and Microsoft. And if Google bets wrong, they could find their commanding lead in search eroded over time. A relatively small acquisition to keep Powerset of of Microsoft’s hands, even if just a hedging move, may suddenly be attractive to them.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0