Erick Schonfeld
New York
Now: Traction Technology; Previous: Touchcast, TechCrunch, Business 2.0, Fortune
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Articles by Erick Schonfeld
Broadcast TV And Web Media Sites Winning In Online Video, Twitter Users Most Engaged – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years You can hardly run into a media site these days that no longer includes online video (even we are getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV). But which kinds of media sites are getting the most views? In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels.
What Should An iPad Newspaper Look Like? – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years News Corp is taking the iPad very seriously as a new way to distribute the news. The media giant is taking it so seriously that it is developing a new publication called the Daily which will only be available on the iPad (no print edition, no Website). News Corp is hiring 100 journalists for this iPad newspaper and is reportedly working with engineers on loan from Apple to make it shine.
高確度情報を入手―iPhone 5はCDMA / GSMデュアルモードのグローバルフォンだ
われわれが入手した情報によれば、近くリリースされるiPhone 5は、CDMA（アメリカではVerizon、Sprint)とGSM （AT&T、T-Mobile.)の両方をサポートすることがほぼ確実と判明した。 この情報は以前から噂としては流れていたし、Verizonの幹部が半ば公式に認めたこともある。しかし、真相を確認するには実地の証拠に勝るものはない。 私は最近、iOSプラットフォームで現在非常にポピュラーになっているアプリのデベロッパーから、匿名を条件に有力な情報の提供を受けることができた。明かされた情報は、CDMA/GSMのデュアル・サポートが事実であることを限りなく確実にするような証拠を含んでいた。 私が受け取ったログによれば、情報提供者のアプリに対して最近ごく少数のユーザーから特異なアクセスが発生していることが分かる。アクセス元は全く新しいAppleの単一のデバイスで、間違いなくデュアルモード、すなわちCDMAとGSMの双方をサポートしている。 ログによれば、このごく少数のユーザーがテストしているのはiOS 5を搭載したiPhone...
The Daily Show Reveals Chatroulette To Be Filled With Creepy Journalists – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years If you’ve read about random video chat site Chatroulette lately, you’ll know that it is filled with naked people and journalists. And that’s exactly what The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart found in his exposé of the Web service. In between the random pervs, he actually found more journalists looking for pervs, or something. The clip has cameos from Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who insisted he wasn’t cruising or anything.
The Squeeze Continues: Venture Fundraising Shrinks 82 Percent in Second Quarter – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years Venture capital keeps getting squeezed as an asset class. The second quarter of 2009 saw the lowest level of capital going into VC funds since the first quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NCVA). During the second quarter, VC funds in the U.S. raised only $1.7 billion, an 82 percent drop from the second quarter of 2008, when $9.3 billion was raised.
Andreessen On Skype: "This Is One Of The Most Important Companies On the Internet." – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.
FetchBack Fetches $40 Million From GSI Commerce – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Let the ad retargeting acquisitions begin. This morning, GSI Commerce announced it purchased FetchBack, an advertising startup which specializes in retargeting. The size of the cash deal was not disclosed, but one source puts it in the $40 million range.
Breyer: “It Is The Best Time Over The Past Decade To Be An Entrepreneur” – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years In Part III of my interview with Accel partner Jim Breyer, we get into the disruptions occurring in the venture capital industry itself with the abundance of angel money and the impact that is having on traditional VC firms. In the video interview above, I ask him whether he thinks there is a Series A Crunch. “I don’t think there is,” he states, echoing what Paul Lee has argued here before.
Apple Zeros In On Deals For Its Cloud Music Service – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Apple is furiously negotiating with the record labels to finalize deals which will allow it to stream music from the Internet to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods) and computers. It just came to terms with Sony Music, according to a Bloomberg report, which means that of the four major labels it’s got three down (EMI, Warner, and Sony), and one to go (Universal Music).
Atlassian’s 2011 Revenues Were $102 Million With No Sales People – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies is Sydney-based Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development (including JIRA and Confluence). CEO Scott Farquhar and president Jay Simons were in New York City last week talking to investment bankers exploring an eventual IPO and dropped by the TCTV studio.
Sorry Bit.ly, Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Another hole is about to be filled in Twitter’s product features. CEO Evan Williams just confirmed plans to launch its own link shortener on stage during the final Q&A session at Chirp. HE noted that it would be “stupid” not to add native link-shortening capabilities into Twitter, since most Twitter clients already have that feature. “We want to solve that problem,” he said. “Everyone else has solved that problem.
Mining The Thought Stream – TechCrunch
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right now about any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
When It Comes To URL Shorteners, bit.ly Is Now The Biggest – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years Well, that was fast. No more than a day or two after Twitter switched over to bit.ly as its default link shortener (from TinyURL), bit.ly is now the most popular URL shortening service. According to statistics published by Tweetmeme, bit.ly now accounts for 46 percent of all the short URLs on Twitter over the past 24 hours, while TinyURL’s share is down to 43 percent.
GSV Capital Buys Facebook Stock At $70 Billion Valuation; Its Own Stock Pops 21 Percent – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Everyone is trying to get pre-IPO Facebook shares any way they can. Some investors purchase shares on secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. Others broker private sales. Today, GSV Capital, a publicly traded investment management company, announced that it has purchased a small number of shares (225,000) at a price ($29.28) which would give Facebook an implied $70 billion valuation.
How Google Speeds Up The Chrome Release Cycle (Slideshow) – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Google’s approach to developing its Chrome browser is to release updates early and often. Its goal is to put out a new release every six weeks or so. Updates have become so routine that Google barely even mentions them anymore. Anthony LaForge, the technical program manager at Google overseeing Chrome development, created the presentation below (and posted it on Google Docs) to explain how Chrome’s development cycles work.
2010 State Of The Blogosphere: Facebook And Twitter Drive The Most Traffic (Slides) – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Earlier today, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra gave his annual State of The Blogosphere presentation at the ad:tech conference. Technorati will be blogging about the findings over the next few days, which is based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers. But we have the full slide presentation below. Some key takeaways: Self-employed bloggers now account for 21% of those surveyed, compared to 9% last year. But only 11% say their primary income comes from blogging.
TubeMogul: People Watch Facebook Videos Longer, And Click On More Ads – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Facebook is now the fifth largest video site by audience size. ComScore estimates that 41 million people a month watch videos on Facebook, which is more than on Hulu, CBS,, or Microsoft’s sites. What is remarkable about Facebook’s rise as a video destination is that it isn’t even trying very hard to be a video site. “I don’t think Facebook has video strategy per se,” says TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson.
Google's Chief Economist: "Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News" – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google Launches Search Options, Declares Real-Time Search Biggest Challenge – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years Google has just launched a new “search options” feature on its main search page. When you click on “Search options” you can filter your search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view.
Google Docs Gets More Realtime; Adds Google Drawings To The Mix – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Slowly but surely, Google keeps trying to chip away at Microsoft’s core Office productivity suite with Google Docs, its free online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Today, Google Drawing is being added to the mix and Google Docs and Spreadsheets is getting a major realtime update. Both are being announced at Google’s Atmosphere event. Google Drawings is not really a drawing app, it’s more of an online whiteboard.
Twitter Adds Places To Its Geo-Tweets, Just Don't Call It A Check-In – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Twitter is moving into Foursquare and Gowalla’s territory. CEO Evan Williams just announced at Chirp that it is starting to add places as a geo-location feature. Twitter turned on geo-location for developers last November, andbegan playing around with map features on Twitter.com itself last month. Currently, geo-tweets contain the lat/long coordinates, and can be identified by city or neighborhood.
Microsoft Agrees With Apple And Google: "The Future Of The Web Is HTML5" – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Did we mention that 2010 would be a big year for HTML5? Apple and Google are pushing it big time, and now so is Microsoft. When Internet Explorer 9 comes out, it will support HTML5 and help make it more common across the Web. “The future of the web is HTML5,” writes Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for IE at Microsoft in a blog post talking about Web video. Microsoft still supports Flash as well, but HTML5 and Flash are at loggerheads.
Twitter's Gift To Developers: Limitless User Streams And Annotations – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years One of the biggest gripes among Twitter developers are the rate limits on Twitter data, particularly Tweets, Retweets and other user data.
Huffington Post Buys Adaptive Semantics To Keep Up With 100,000 Comments A Day – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years The Huffington Post has acquired its first company in a small cash deal, and it is not another blog or media site, but a pure technology startup called Adaptive Semantics. The two-person startup provides a semantic analysis engine (aka JuLiA) already used by the Huffington Post to help moderate the 100,000 comments published on the blog every day.
The biggest mouth in Silicon Valley
Marc Benioff wants to transform the software industry By Erick Schonfeld Business 2.0 Arnold Schwarzenegger, left, became an unwitting prop in a Marc Benioff production when the CEO bought 500 tickets to a charity premiere of T3. Story Tools RELATED Business 2.0: Browse a hand-picked guide to the best technology links on the Web.
Kickstarter, Two Years And 20,000 Projects Later: $53 Million Pledged, $40 Million Collected – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Two years ago, crowd-funding phenom Kickstarter launched with a handful of projects. Anyone with an idea for a film, album, art project, or product could make their pitch, say how much they needed to get started, and ask for pledges. Once the minimum amount needed was pledged, the project would get started. Today is Kickstarter’s birthday, and it is releasing some stats. Over the past two years, $53 million has been pledged for 20,371 projects.
After Its 12 Seconds Of Fame, 12seconds.tv Fizzles Out – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Video micro-messaging is hard. Remember when Seesmic was supposed to be the Twitter of video before it mothballed that idea and morphed into a family of realtime streaming apps instead? Now 12seconds.tv, which launched in 2008 with the simple idea of leaving short, public, 12-second video messages for people on the Web, is calling it quits.
Exclusive: An Early Look At News.me, The New York Times' Answer To The Daily – TechCrunch
Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp’s iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City’s meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won’t look anything like The Daily.
Qwiki's Mapolicious iPad App Hits iTunes – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years A couple weeks ago, Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce came by my office to talk about his new iPad app (watch video below), but he wasn’t quite ready to show it. This morning it finally hit iTunes, where you can download it for free. In many ways, Qwiki was made for the iPad because it is like a visual Wikipedia.
In The Face Of Falling Ad Revenues, AOL's Armstrong Says: "We Are Hustling As Fast As We Can" – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years AOL had a rough quarter. Total revenues dropped 23 percent, and even the advertising part (you know, AOL’s future) was down 19 percent to $354 million. In the same quarter, Yahoo saw display advertising revenues rise 20 percent, Google’s ad revenues were up 21.5 percent, and even Microsoft saw a 12 percent uptrick in online revenues. “We are hustling as fast as we can,” offered AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on the earnings conference call today.
Not Playing Around. EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout. – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. So the total value of the deal could amount to as much as $400 million when all is said and done.
Twitter Finds Growth Abroad With 58.4 Million Global Visitors In September – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Twitter’s growth these days seems to be coming from abroad. ComScore data shows a 6.7 percent jump from August to September in worldwide vistors to 58.4 million (which translates to 949 percent increase from a year ago). The 20.9 million visitors from the U.S., in contrast, has remained flat since June. These numbers do not include mobile or desktop app usage.
Google News Makes A Concession To Whining Publishers: Only First Five Clicks Are Free – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years Today, the FTC held a hearing on the crisis in the (print) news publishing industry, which gave Rupert Murdoch yet another opportunity to publicly call out Google about its supposedly thieving ways. Google’s response: Hey, we send out 4 billion clicks a month to news sites. If you don’t now what to do with all that traffic, it’s not our fault. (I’m paraphrasing).
RockMelt: A Browser Built For Sharing (First Hands On And 500 Exclusive Invites) – TechCrunch
If you are going to create a new browser from scratch and go up against the Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple, you might as well make it really different. RockMelt, a company backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen which has been under wraps until today, is trying to build a new browsing experience from the ground up. Are they crazy? “The big thing,” says Andreessen, “is that the browser world is very much in flux right now.” RockMelt is built first and foremost for sharing.
Kleiner Perkins And CRV-Backed iControl Now Controls uControl As Home Automation Market Consolidates – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years The home automation market is consolidating, as evidenced by a the merger today of iControl and UControl. Both offer home monitoring, security, and energy management products accessible through the Internet and mobile phones. For instance, with iControl’s iPhone app, you can lower your thermostat from work.
One Medical Raises $20 Million For The Modern Doctor’s Office – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 8 years It’s 2011, but most doctor’s offices are still stuck in the 1990s when it comes to patient-facing technology. The receptionist probably has a computer to manage appointments, but typically you still sign in on paper, fill out forms on a clipboard, and your doctor relies on a loosely-bound sheaf of papers to check your medical records.
Estimate: In Two Years, Streaming TV Will Be An $800 Million Business for Netflix and Hulu – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 8 years By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web, cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato.
Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 11 years You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.
Scribd CTO: "We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5" (Exclusive Screenshots) – TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 9 years Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages.
comScore: Android Passes iPhone In Total U.S. Subscribers
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 8 years The latest mobile subscriber estimates are out from comScore, and for the first time in November, 2010, Android passed the iPhone in total number of U.S. smartphone subscribers. Comscore estimates there are 61.5 million smartphone subscribers in the U.S., and 26 percent of them own an Android phone versus 25 percent with an iPhone. In the previous month—October, 2010—Apple still edged out Google with 24.6 percent market share versus 23.5 percent.
Mobile Insiders Say Apple's iAds Are "Hurting"
Apple’s iAds are hitting a rough spot. Across the board, several developers I’ve spoken to confirm that “fill rates” for iAds dropped drastically after the New Year and have yet to recover. The fill rate—what percentage of the ad inventory is actually filled with an ad—for two separate developers plummeted from 18 percent to 6 percent. And in a few instances for some newer apps, none of the ad slots were getting filled, compared to nearly complete fill rates from other mobile ad networks.
Groupon Closes The Redemption Loop With Loyalty Rewards
Groupon may be struggling to get its IPO out the door, but that is not stopping it from introducing new products. Up until now, Groupon has built a billion-dollar business by getting local merchants to offer great one-time deals to consumers. Those daily deals are all about attracting new customers. Now the company is about to roll out a new product called Groupon Rewards that tries to give merchants a way to increase customer loyalty.
Apple Opens Up More Ways To Get Paid On The iPhone, Adds Key New Features. Apps Hit 800 Million Downloads.
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years iPhone apps have been downloaded 800 million times, and there are now more than 25,000 apps in the iTunes store. Apple is detailing some of the new features in the next version of the iPhone OS in apress conference going on live right now.
How Much Is A Suggested Slot On Twitter Worth? Jason Calacanis Offers $250,000.
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years When newbies sign up to Twitter now, they are presented with a list of 100 suggested users to start following. Simply being on that list can boost your followers well above 100,000. Several people and organizations on the list (such as Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose, the New York Times, and CNN) now have more than 250,000 followers each. Many of the most popular Twitter users are on the list, including TechCrunch (we have 214,465 followers).
Exclusive: Gilt Taste Is Cooking Up An iPad App That Will Let You Swipe Without Touching
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 8 years Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste—a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other “artisinal” foods. While it’s easy to get distracted by the jaw-dropping prices ($50 steaks anyone?), the part I find interesting is that Gilt Taste is also an online magazine. Mouth-watering food photography helps to move the merchandise.
The Daily Show: "My Stalker Just Grunted On My Twitter"
Erick Schonfeld @erickschonfeld / 10 years http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:219519 One sure sign that your product is entering mainstream consciousness is when Jon Stewart makes fun of it on The Daily Show. That happened to Twitter last night. I’m sure most of you have already seen the Twitter segment, but in case you haven’t, it is embedded above.
Tim Armstrong's Secret Project Is To Turn AOL Into A Low-Cost Content Machine
Tim Armstrong's Secret Project Is To Turn AOL Into A Low-Cost Content Machine A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.
Seeking A Better Way To Find Part-Timers, Urban Interns Raises An Angel Round
Seeking A Better Way To Find Part-Timers, Urban Interns Raises An Angel Round If you’ve ever tried to find a great intern or a great internship, it turns out to be a lot more work than it should be. Internships are an afterthought for most job boards, but increasingly companies are looking to try out their next hires before giving them a full salaried position. Urban Interns joins a growing list of internship-focused sites, allowing companies and interns to find each other.
Schmidt: "We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room."
Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.
Twiangulate Who You Share In Common With Other People On Twitter
Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map. For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash.
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