A few days ago, we noted that Facebook was testing putting links to QR codes on their main profile pages. Now we know why. Apparently, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of their location feature roll-out, which will use these codes.

A source with knowledge of Facebook’s plans tells us that the QR codes will be used with an upcoming version of Facebook’s mobile app. More specifically, businesses could potentially print out a QR code and put it on a wall or a counter in their venue to allow users to scan it to check-in at that store, we’re told. Facebook is expected to unveil its location plans at its f8 conference in late April.

For those unfamiliar, a QR code (short for “quick response”) is a sort of barcode that stores information which can be captured and interpreted by a mobile device by way of the camera on the device. Google, Microsoft, and others have been experimenting with their usage recently, and now Facebook is hoping on board.

But Facebook’s idea is particularly interesting because it’s based around the hot check-in space right now. While services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are quickly gaining popularity, both still have under 1 million users, while Facebook has over 400 million users. Recently, the social network has been testing out pulling in data from both of those networks, rather than trying to build its own location network from scratch.

That said, with a feature like this, it appears that you could use Facebook to check-in, then perhaps send it back out to someplace like Foursquare. The problem with Gowalla is that their API is currently read-only, so checking-in would have to be done through their own app, and not Facbeook.

While the QR code links spotted the other day didn’t work yet, it was clear that one would link to the actual profile page, while the other would link to a particular status update. It seems that Page owners will get the option to view them soon as well.

Facebook’s location plans continue to unfold.

Continue Reading: Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans

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Look, I’m all for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous. Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet. Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean they’re out to screw you by any means necessary? No.

The video even delves into Google Buzz and its privacy debacle. But it implies that the issue stems from Google’s desire to control you. Really, it’s just that Google can’t seem to comprehend social, and was rushed into rolling out Buzz, and handled it very poorly.

The bottom line is that if you really think Google is out to get you, you shouldn’t be using it — at all. In fact, they have a new analytics opt-out feature that is probably right up your alley. But you also probably shouldn’t be using the Internet at all, because all of these companies are doing basically the same thing to varying degrees.

Maybe Google wants to murder you, but I don’t know, I’d bet that they’re not going to.

Continue Reading: Google May Slay Your First Born Child, According To This Video

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Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer Joseph Smarr late last year, but it’s Yahoo that’s finally adding the 8-year old idea of turning the address book model upside down and letting people subscribe to it rather than keep their own quickly outdated lists. They’ve launched a new feature called “Share my info” in Yahoo Contacts that is, like the old Plaxo product, a way to subscribe to contact information and have it automatically updated.

Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has their address book updated.

It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002.

But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book.

Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information.

There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m “subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time.

I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.

Continue Reading: Yahoo Launches Plaxo Feature Eight Years Later, And It’s Still A Good Idea

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We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation documents, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting the evidence. Here’s their version:

In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”

Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”

The quote seems to be referring to full-length movies, though viral videos are mentioned (it’s unclear in this context whether they’re saying movies will go viral, or if they’re talking about traditionally more viral video clips). As it turns out, it’s the latter. And they were probably joking about it. Here’s the actual Email thread, in chronological order:

SUBJECT: Re:http://www.filecabi.net/

Jul 29, 2005  1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

steal it!

Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, steal the movies?

Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

haha ya.

or something.

just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.
-s

Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic… but it’s because they are a stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people use video on the internet.

Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type.
i’m not really disagreeing with you but i also think we shouldn’t be so high & mighty and think we’re better than these guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.
-s

Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:

another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do have a community and it’s ALL user generated content.

-s

It’s worth pointing out that the subject of the Email thread was ‘http://www.filecabi.net’, and that big-boys.com is now Break.com — it’s pretty clear that Chen and Hurley are referring to the brief, dumb sort of videos that often go viral as opposed to full length movies. And, based on the ‘haha’ comment (which is ommitted from Viacom’s document), Chen and Hurley may have just been joking about stealing any content at all.

This doesn’t clear YouTube by any means (there are still plenty of other suspect quotes).  But it casts some doubt on the rest of Viacom’s ‘undisputed facts’.

Continue Reading: Viacom Seems To Be Misrepresenting YouTube Founder’s Call To “Steal It!”

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There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created. Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause, and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.

That’s partially a good thing, of course. A room full of 2,000 people all shouting their opinions on a topic isn’t much of anything except chaos. But sometimes there are people in the audience who have a really interesting perspective on a topic, or even know more about the topic than the people on stage.

The idea of an unconference has evolved over the years with Foo Camp and BAR Camp (and others) where the audience and the speakers are one. Those types of events are really rewarding, but they don’t work on a large scale single track event. Again, it would just be chaos.

A couple of years ago Dave Winer had the idea of putting people from the audience, literally, on stage (there’s a link out there somewhere but I can’t find it). As far as I know no one has ever really experimented with this yet. But we’re going to try it out at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on May 24-26.

We’re going to leave an empty seat on stage for many of the group panels at TechCrunch Disrupt and invite someone from the audience to come up and participate. I’m not sure how exactly we’re going to do this yet. We could just ask for a volunteer from the audience right before the panel, for example. But a better way might be to take volunteers for the panels early on in the event and pre-screen them for interestingness, passion for the topic, knowledge, etc.

I particularly like the idea of including audience members in the group of experts who judge and comment on new startups launching.

I’m guessing some of the smartest things on stage will be said by these audience members. And it will certainly freshen the format. And I really like the idea of a panel of top experts in a field along with someone who may not have the resume, but certainly has the knowledge and opinions, to be up there too.

We’ll expand the discussion of this on the Disrupt blog over the coming weeks, and announce firmer plans closer to the event.

Continue Reading: An Experiment: Putting The Audience On Stage (For Real) At TechCrunch Disrupt

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I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the system is flawed, in that the more notifications you get, the worse the experience is because it can be hard to manage them all. And one reason I always have the iPhone on me, even when taking around an Android phone, is that there’s no good way to get my notifications on another device. A new startup may offer a solution for both of those problems.

Notifo is a Y Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power resides underneath; it’s a platform.

Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now notification-ready.

What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example.

The idea is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device.

While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example, Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices.

And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the Notifo website.

Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was formerly doing some work for Twitter.

You can find the free app in the App Store here.

Continue Reading: Notifo Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything

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Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, has secured $7.4 million in Series B funding, led by Redpoint Ventures with Shasta Ventures Bay Partners, First Round Capital and other investors participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $13.4 million.

Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount. The company says that it will use the funds to accelerate product development and work on other ways to create supply and demand for gift cards on the site.

While Plastic Jungle didn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s CEO Garry Briggs says that its revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. Briggs also said that “millions” of dollars have flown through the marketplace since the company’s launch two years ago. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool and others.

Continue Reading: Plastic Jungle Raises $7.4 Million for Gift Card Marketplace

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I’m at the NewsMorphosis Conference in Hawaii today locked in a day of debates about the state of news quality and how the hell we find a business model to keep paying for it. It’s a big issue locally– earlier this year three of Hawaii’s five largest TV news stations merged operations and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is  merging with the other daily paper the Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in plenty of layoffs and general civic concern.

So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got a few more details on the site and the approach.

Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so many dailies are dreading.

“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:

-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?

-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?

-How do you do that in a sustainable way?

On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.

The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community.  “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.”

But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.

Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”

So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.”

Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we consider “new” media right now.

And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today.

(More on Temple’s blog here.)

Continue Reading: More News about Omidyar’s Peer News

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There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. Y Combinator’s Data Marketplace is hoping to change this by providing a platform where financial professionals can request data sets and then data aggregators/consultants can then find and format the appropriate data.

Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format.

Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for. For example, here’s a data set of a complete list of Wal-Mart Store Locations, which is priced at $30.

Prices range for data, and can be anywhere from $5 to several thousand dollars. Data Marketplace co-founder Matt Hodan tells me he spent $10,000 in on year on data at one of the financial organizations he worked for. Data Marketplace takes a 14% cut of each transaction on the site, from the provider. Data Marketplace handles all of the payment processing and allows users to directly purchase and download resources in an accessible format online.

Hodan says that current models for selling and distributing data online are inefficient and expensive for financial organizations. Users only pay for what they need as opposed to plans or buying bundles of information. And providers don’t have many platforms where they can sell their data in a marketplace.

Data Marketplace is similar in some ways to Factual, which is a Wikipedia-like site for open data, and InfoChimps, which takes a more collaborative approach to open data.

Continue Reading: YC-Funded Data Marketplace Is An Amazon For Structured Information

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Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them. Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.

Google is testing a browser-based opt-out solution for Google Analytics, they briefly note today on the Google Analytics blog. Specifically, this would be a “global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.” They note that engineers are finalizing and testing the funtionality.

How exactly this will work globally across all browsers remains to be seen. While Firefox and Chrome allow for easy use of plug-ins, Internet Exploerer and Safari are a bit more complicated. Still, if you’re a user who really cares about Google not tracking this information about you, it will probably be worth it to you to install this thing.

Of course, the other question is what this means for site owners. While it’s unlikely that a lot of users would install something like this, what if they did? That could drastically cripple the entire point of Google Analytics.

[image: Paramount Pictures]

[thanks Michael]

Continue Reading: Google Will Soon Offer A Way For Users To Opt-Out Of Google Analytics Tracking

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